Saving Iceland » Laws

Fit For Print – Did The New York Times Get it Wrong?

friendoficeland — Fri, 21 Mar 2014 15:32:18 +0000

Photos by Ólafur Már Sigurðsson

Tourism, it need hardly be pointed out, is big business in Iceland, an industry which in the years following the crash has ballooned, with more than double the country’s population visiting last year. But while making it into the New York Times would normally be good news for Iceland’s economy, a recent entry about Iceland’s highlands on the publication’s “52 Places to Visit in 2014” list was less than ideal from a publicity standpoint.

The paragraph-long blurb did mention the area’s unique landscape, but its key takeaway was that the “famously raw natural beauty” of the highlands—and more specifically, the Þjórsárver wetlands located in the interior—may not be enjoyable by anyone, let alone tourists, for much longer. As reads the article’s subtitle: “Natural wonders are in danger. Go see them before it’s too late.”

The suggested threat facing the integrity of Þjórsárver? Not impending volcanic eruptions or natural deterioration. Rather, the article stated that the Icelandic government recently “announced plans to revoke those protections” which had been safeguarding the wetlands, and additionally, that “a law intending to further repeal conservation efforts has been put forward.”

The “52 Places” article was widely quoted within the Icelandic media. Within days of its publication, the Ministry for the Environment and Natural Resources issued a brief statement in Icelandic bearing the title “Incorrect Reporting by the New York Times.” It claimed that the New York Times article was “full of misrepresentations” and was “paradoxical and wrong.” The author of the article, contributing travel writer Danielle Pergament, was not contacted in regard to any “misrepresentations,” and neither was the New York Times—although the latter was invited to send a reporter to an open Environment and Communications Committee meeting on Þjórsárver a few days after the article’s publication.

So what exactly caused all the kerfuffle? Did The New York Times get it all wrong?

A Contentious History

Before we address the “incorrect reporting” alleged by the Ministry of the Environment, it will be useful to step back and explain a little of the context surrounding the Þjórsárver Wetlands and the battles which have been waged over this area since the 1960s.

Located in Iceland’s interior, the Þjórsárver wetlands stretch 120 square kilometres from the Hofsjökull glacier in the northern highlands to surrounding volcanic deserts and are characterized by remarkable biodiversity. A description on the World Wildlife Fund website points not only to the variance of the landscape itself—“tundra meadows intersected with numerous glacial and spring-fed streams, a large number of pools, ponds, lakes and marshes, and rare permafrost mounds”—but also to the area’s unique plant and birdlife, including one of the largest breeding colonies of Pink-footed Geese in the world.

Þjórsárver is fed by Iceland’s longest river, Þjórsá, which also sources much of the country’s electricity. Since the early 1960s, Landsvirkjun, the National Power Company of Iceland, has proposed several plans for creating a reservoir on Þjórsá that would facilitate increased energy production and enlarge energy reserves. Such reserves would not only be useful for existing industries, such as aluminium smelting, but—following the proposed creation of a submarine cable to Europe—could also be sold as part of foreign energy contracts as early as 2020.

Through the years, Landsvirkjun’s proposals have been met with frequent opposition, which in 1981 led to a nature preserve being created in the Þjórsárver wetlands. However, a provision was made within these protections, allowing Landsvirkjun to create a future reservoir, provided that the company could prove that the wetlands would not be irrevocably harmed, and that the Environment Agency of Iceland approved the reservoir plans.

By the late ‘90s, there was another flurry of activity: in 1997, the Iceland Nature Conservation Association (INCA) was founded with the “primary objective” of “establish[ing] a national park in the highlands.” Two years later, the government began work on an extensive “Master Plan for Hydro and Geothermal Energy Resources.” Divided into two phases that spanned from 1999 -2010, the Master Plan was intended to evaluate close to 60 hydro and geothermal development options, assessing them for environmental impact, employment and regional development possibilities, efficiency, and profitability.

Over the course of the Master Plan’s two phases, it was decided that the nature preserve established in the Þjórsárver Wetlands was to be expanded and designated as a “protected area.” The new boundaries were to be signed into regulation based on the Nature Conservation Act in June 2013 (the resolution was passed by parliament that year according to the Master Plan), until the Minister of the Environment, Sigurður Ingi Jóhannsson, elected to postpone making them official in order to consider a new reservoir proposal from Landsvirkjun.

Based on this new proposal, Sigurður Ingi has drawn up new boundaries for the protected area, which would expand the original nature reservoir, but cover less area than the original boundaries created by the Environment Agency of Iceland. The new suggested boundaries do not extend as far down the Þjórsá river, and therefore would allow Landsvirkjun to build their Norðlingalda Reservoir. Conservationists who oppose this point out that the three-tiered Dynkur waterfall will be destroyed if Landsvirkjun’s reservoir plans go through.

Parsing Facts

This brings us back the alleged “misrepresentations” in the New York Times write-up. Best to go through the Ministry of the Environment’s statement and address their qualms one by one:

“The article in question is full of misrepresentations about Þjórsárver preserve and the government’s intentions regarding its protection and utilisation. For instance, it states that Þjórsárver covers 40% of Iceland, while in fact, it only covers .5% of the country today.”

The first version of the article, since corrected, read as though the Þjórsárver wetlands constituted 40% of Iceland. In reality, it is the highlands that constitute 40% of Iceland’s landmass, and Þjórsárver is only part of this area. Following a call from Árni Finnsson, the chair of INCA who was quoted in the piece, this error was corrected.

“There are no plans to lift the protections currently in place. On the contrary, the Environment and Natural Resources Minister aims to expand the protected area and if that plan goes through, it’ll be an expansion of about 1,500 square kilometers, or about 1.5 % of the total area of Iceland.”

It is true that Minister of the Environment Sigurður Ingi Jóhannsson has not suggested that the current protections—namely, the preserve that was established in the ‘80s—be altered. Nevertheless, it is also misleading to suggest that he personally “aims to expand the protected area,” as the expansion plans were basically mandated by the findings of the Master Plan. Moreover, he elected not to approve the Environment Agency’s expanded boundaries, but rather to propose new boundaries which would create a smaller protected area than was intended.

So no, Sigurður Ingi is not cutting back on “current protections,” but that’s only because he refused to approve the protections that were supposed to be in place already.

“Therefore, it is clear that there will be a substantial expansion of the protected area under discussion. The New York Times asserting that protections on Þjórsárver will be lifted in order to enable hydroelectric power development is both paradoxical and wrong.”

What we’re seeing the Ministry of the Environment do here is a neat little bit of semantic parsing. The NYT article states that after spending decades protecting the wetlands, “the government announced plans to revoke protections, allowing for the construction of hydropower plants.” This is a carefully qualified statement, and might accurately refer to any of several ministerial initiatives, from Sigurður Ingi’s redrawing of the Þjórsárver protected area boundaries, to his recent proposal to repeal the law on nature conservation (60/2013). This law was approved by Alþingi and was set to go into effect on April 1, 2014. It included specific protections for natural phenomena, such as lava formations and wetlands. In November, Sigurður Ingi introduced a bill to repeal the nature conservation law, although this has yet to be voted on by parliament.

So, no, the New York Times article was not “paradoxical and wrong.” It was, unfortunately, quite correct.

A Land Beyond

Although debates over Þjórsárver and development proposals in the Icelandic highlands have been well covered and discussed in detail by the Icelandic media, conservation issues around this area have not, thus far, made many headlines internationally. So it is noteworthy that an outlet such as The New York Times chose to highlight these issues on a more prominent stage, especially given that Iceland’s breathtaking landscapes are often a driving force supporting its tourism industry. As Árni Finnsson wonders, “Who goes to Iceland to see power plants and power lines?”

While an over-saturation of tourists in fragile natural environments can pose its own, very real, threat to nature reserves and natural sites like Þjórsárver, tourism can still have a positive influence on conservation issues, such as, Árni recalls, when a greater interest in whale watching led to more effective challenges to Icelandic whaling. “It takes many millions to recover a loss of reputation,” says Árni Finnsson, speaking about Iceland’s image as a country whose nature is its biggest selling point. “It’s a huge resource, but it is so easy to destroy it.”

It was, in fact, specifically the threat of development that made this particular site stand out to Danielle Pergament. “I think people—over here [in the US] anyway—are well aware of the natural beauty in Iceland. But not many people know that the wetlands are under threat, that there is a chance that the famous landscape may be developed. I was shocked to learn about it myself. That is why I wanted to write about it.”

The question remains, however, if the attention drawn to Þjórsárver’s tenuous position will actually generate much new support. After all, in declining to publicly “correct” the New York Times, the Ministry effectively contained the debate to an Icelandic-speaking audience here in Iceland. And anyway, even if thousands of tourists become suddenly impassioned by the cause of the Icelandic wetlands, the area may remain inaccessible to many of them. “The Þjórsárver wetlands are like an El Dorado, a land beyond,” says Árni Finnsson. “They aren’t really suitable for tourism, or not for many tourists, at least. Maybe a few very keen, very well-trained hikers.”

At the end of the day, then, if the choice is made to protect Þjórsárver, it will have to be for less tangible reasons than the possible dollars generated by tourists, or international pressure. It has to come from within.

But first, let’s get the facts straight.

Originally published in Grapevine.is Feb. 10.

Proceeding With Caution (Svandís Svavarsdóttir, member of the Left Green Party, on the balance beween the nature’s value for the energy industry or tourism and its categorial value)

Peaceful Environmental Protest Following Arrest

Björk, Patti Smith, Lykke Li and More to Play Concert for Icelandic Conservation

friendoficeland — Wed, 05 Mar 2014 10:14:04 +0000

Event takes place on March 18 in Reykjavik at Harpa.

Bjork will play a concert in protest at the Icelandic government’s proposed changes to conservation laws.

The Icelandic singer tops the bill at the event, which will take place on March 18 at the Harpa Concert Hall in Reykjavik, Iceland. Artists appearing include Lykke Li, Patti Smith, Mammút (pictured below), Highlands, Of Monsters And Men, Samaris and Retro Stefson.

The concert is organised in conjunction with the Iceland Nature Conservation Association (INCA), Landvernd, the Icelandic Environment Association and director Darren Aronofsky, whose film Noah was shot on location in Iceland in 2012 and will premiere at Sambíóin Egilshöll Cinema on the same afternoon.

Collectively operating under the name Stopp!, the group aims to encourage the Icelandic authorities to protect Iceland’s natural environment and impose controls on the damming of glacial rivers and harnessing of geothermal energy, in light of new legislation, reports RUV.

This project was introduced at a press conference at Harpa on the 3^rd of March 2014. Björk and Darren Aronofsky participated in the press conference.

The artists will donate their time and the net income will go to INCA and Landvernd.

The following statement lists the group’s demands:

Stop – Guard the Garden!

All over the world too much of priceless nature has been sacrificed for development, often falsely labeled as sustainable. Rain forests have been cut, waterfalls dammed, land eroded, lakes and oceans polluted, earth’s climate altered and the oceans are now rapidly getting more and more acidic.

In Iceland, the Karahnjukar Power Plant has become the symbol for the destruction which threatens human existence on this earth.

It is our duty to protect Icelandic nature and leave it to future generations, undamaged. The Icelandic highlands, Europe’s largest remaining wilderness – where nature is still largely untouched by man, is not just a refuge and treasure which we inherited and will inherit. The highlands belong to the world as a whole. Nowhere else can we find another Lake Myvatn, Thjorsarver Wetlands, Sprengisandur, Skaftafell or Lake Langisjor.

We demand that Thjorsarver Wetlands, the wilderness west of Thjorsa River and the waterfalls downstream will be protected for all future to come. We strongly protest plans by the Minister for the Environment and Resources to change the demarcation line for the extended nature reserve in the Thjorsarver Wetlands. By doing so, the minister creates a space for a new dam at the outskirts of the area. The way in which the minister interprets the law in order to justify that all nature and/or potential power plants are at stake in each and every new phase of the Master Plan for Conservation and Utilization of Nature Areas is an attack on Icelandic nature and not likely to stand in a court of law. [We have engaged a law firm and we are threatening lawsuit if the Minister goes ahead with his plan]

We now have a unique opportunity to turn the highlands into a national park by bill of law to be adopted by the parliament. Thereby the highlands as a whole will be subject to one administrative unit and clearly defined geographically. Thus all plans for power lines, road construction and/or other man made structures which will fragment valuable landscapes of the highlands will belong to history.

We strongly caution against any plans to construct a geothermal power plant at or near Lake Myvatn. The Bjarnarflag Power Plant is not worth the risk. Lake Myvatn is absolutely unique in this world. Hence, we have a great responsibility for its protection.

We demand that the nature of Reykjanes Peninsula will be protected by establishing a volcanic national park and that all power lines will be put underground.

We find it urgent that the government will secure funds for conservation by hiring land wardens and will protect valuable nature areas against the ever growing pressure of mass tourism.

In particular we protest against the attack on nature conservationists, where unprecedented (sic. S.I. editor) and brutal conduct by the police as well as charges pressed against those who want to protect the Galgahraun Lava, was cruel and unnecessary. We remind that the right of the public to protest nature damage everywhere, worldwide, is a basic premise for the success of securing future human existence on this earth.

We demand that the proposed bill of law repealing the new nature protection laws be withdrawn and that the new laws should take effect, as stipulated, on April 1.

The Wheels of Greed Are Spinning in Iceland

friendoficeland — Sun, 16 Feb 2014 22:41:39 +0000

Iceland once was set as an example of unspoiled nature, clean energy and extraordinary financial recovery. Unfortunately, lately the strong Atlantic winds of change start to blow in the wrong direction.

By Julia Vol

In the wake of the devastating financial crisis that brought Iceland to its knees, the people took charge, went out on the streets and demanded the right-wing government to quit what later will be named the “pots and pans revolution”. The right-wing government, led by the Independence Party, was deeply involved in corruption and notoriously known for its crony capitalistic approach in reaching for the country’s leadership, which eventually led to the economical collapse.

The new social-democratic alliance led by Johanna Sigurðardóttir came to power in May 2009, and in the aftermath of the financial collapse had a lot of mess to clean and painful decisions to make. However, under Sigurðardóttir’s leadership the economic situation stabilized and recovery came about quicker than expected. In the years to follow, Iceland was often quoted as an example for economic recovery to fellow crisis countries such as Greece and Ireland. In addition to essential financial reforms and regulations, the social-democratic government set the foundation for long-term social and environmental sustainability. Natural preservation laws and committees were put forward to minimize the exploitation of Icelandic natural resources for monetary profit, green economy plans were outlined by the Parliament, and sustainability considerations started to receive growing attention in decision-making processes.

Many Icelanders even claim that the crisis turned out to be somewhat a positive thing, breaking the “gold rush” craze grasping the nation over the years prior to the crisis, and helping people get back to basic values and out of their arrogance and greed.

Still, apparently not enough Icelanders shared this optimistic view, as in April 2013 the right-wing coalition led by the infamous Independent and Progressive Parties were voted back into the government, by a majority of 51% of the votes. Only four years after being disgracefully thrown out of Parliament, the two parties were back on the top again. With less than a year in power, things seem to take a backward turn to the worse quite quickly, especially in regards to issues of natural preservation, social justice and governance on the little island.

A More Utilitarian Use of Nature

The results of the administration switch were soon translated into action. Among the first steps of the new government was to cancel out the Ministry of Environment and merge it with the Ministry of Fishing and Agriculture. No conflict of interests there. The new minister of all the above declared upon entering the office, that his administration would be making more utilitarian usage of the Icelandic nature and refused to sign a bill initiated by the previous government to increase nature protection in Iceland. This promising start embodies the governments’ general line of argument: that whenever environmental considerations are part of the equation they will always count the least.

It’s All About Energy

The previous government had appointed a special professional committee to conduct the “Energy Framework”, a document aimed at providing guidelines on which areas of Iceland could be harnessed for power, and which shall be protected, aiming to regulate and limit the exploitation of natural resources for monetary profit. Shortly after coming to power, the new government called to cancel the Energy Framework guidelines and build a new shiny power plant in areas previously categorized as preserved. The government also dismissed over 400 letters from citizens who raised concerns over the new changes – in a manner that was widely described as arrogant and ignorant. Government officials claimed that experts’ opinions were more important than public opinion, while forgetting to mention that the two experts appointed to deal with the issues were politically appointed with no expertise in energy nor in preservation.

Over the course of the last half a year new plans have been laid out, setting the stage for more energy projects that violate the Energy Framework and the Icelandic conservation law. Experts from all fields are voicing their concerns and dissatisfaction over the very short-sighted environmental assessments made in the preparations for the new plants, warning constantly about the irreversible damage that will be done to Icelandic wilderness and disturbed ecosystems.

Worldly renowned natural areas such as the Mývatn lake, the Þórsjá river and the Icelandic highlands are put in danger of destruction, all for the cause of producing more energy for aluminum smelters. Lately, the Minister of Environment (and agriculture, and fishing), announced that he aimed to change the existing conservation law to allow further development in preserved areas around the Þórsjá river, including damming the river flow. This area (Þjórsárver, S.I. Ed.) has been protected by both the Environment Agency of Iceland and the Ramsar Convention since 1981. As expected, the Icelandic Nature Conservation Association strongly objected the plan, claiming that this will cause irreversible damage to the entire area and the surrounding waterfalls. The minister’s answer to these allegations was that it is okay to sacrifice several waterfalls for the purpose of economic profit which will come out of developing the area.

Infrastructure for Private Interests

The violation of the natural conservation law continued when last October the government presented a brand new program to construct a highway which will pass through an 8,000 year old protected lava field. This expensive plan has been approved by the government right after a long line of a very painful budget cuts in education, welfare, health, culture, research, arts and science (yet not in subsidies to heavy industry). Why such a rush to build a highway in a sparsely populated area in times of financial cuts? The answer followed soon: The family of the Minister of Finances is expected to greatly benefit from the development of this project.

Environmentalist groups appealed against the project to the supreme court, however, the government decided that waiting for the court decision would be a waste of time and gave green light to start the construction. This sparked a protest of concerned citizens, and many of them arrived to express their dissatisfaction with the construction. They were arrested for speaking their mind despite their completely peaceful protest. Among the arrested protesters were some very well-known journalists, professors and public figures, not exactly a group of hooligans. Today, some of these people are facing prosecution for demanding the government to obey the law. This chain of events vividly demonstrates the government’s insistence on proceeding with its plans at all costs, using every possible tool to silence the opposition.

“Enjoy the Icelandic Wilderness (Before it’s Too Late)!”

The disruption and destruction of the Icelandic nature reserves is not preventing the new government from attracting as many tourists as possible, and maximizing profits from marketing Icelandic wilderness before it’s all gone. Tourism is a very fast-growing industry in post-financial crisis Iceland. The number of tourists has tripled over the past 12 years passing the threshold of 1 million tourists in 2013 (keep in mind that the entire population of Iceland is 380,000 people!). Understandably, this raises concerns over the fragile Icelandic nature, which was never exposed to so many people at once. While the previous government was putting forward regulations and preservation plans, the new government announced that 1 million is not enough and aims to bring over 3 million tourists per year within the next few years. Already today the effects of this fast growing industry are evident all around the island: Massive tourism is damaging fragile ecosystems, and Icelandic cities are turning into tourist attractions with decreased space for the local population. Needless to say that such a steep increase in tourism will put strain on the ecological system, especially since there is still no regulation or infrastructure in place to prevent the long-term effects of massive tourism. No wonder then, that even the New York Times strongly recommended its readers to go to Iceland ASAP, before it’s too late.

To Whale or Not to Whale

The paradox of destroying nature while communicating and marketing the image of Iceland as a pure and unspoiled nature destination is very present in the whaling controversy. Last summer the whaling of Fin whales was renewed, and the new administration has also revoked the decision to limit whaling grounds around the capital in favor of whale watching areas. Note that whale watching is the most profitable tourism attraction in the capital area, however, there is an increasing amount of incidents where tourists pay to witness the magic of wild animals but end up watching a very bloody hunting process.

The paradox is that the demand for whale meat worldwide decreases, and that it would be much more profitable to preserve these magnificent creatures for whale watching only. But this does not fall in line with the internal interests of the Icelandic elite, where the family owning the whaling company is well connected. The whaling ships continue their work, and the saddest part of this paradox is that due to low demand many of the endangered animals end their life as dog food in Japan or as some marketing nonsense such as “whale beer”.

The Wheels of Greed are Spinning

Iceland is an amazing country and is home to some of the most creative, innovative, talented and entrepreneurial people. It has the potential to become a role model for a sustainable community in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. For a brief moment there it looked that it might even come true. However, it seems that the strong Atlantic winds bring darker times along. Best put into words by the former Prime Minister Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir: “The current government’s priorities could not be more different from the ones honored by the last one. Inequality is once again rearing its ugly head, and the sharp knife of austerity has been turned towards the welfare system—all to benefit society’s wealthiest and best-off. Once more, the wheels of greed are spinning”.

First published 25 January on Worldwatch-Europe.org

Passion for Lava – The Struggle to Save Gálgahraun Lavafield

friendoficeland — Mon, 21 Oct 2013 17:44:34 +0000

By Dr. Rannveig Magnusdottir

People have different passions. Some people are enthusiastic about coffee, others adore shiny things, yet others are passionate about nature and wildlife. Passion for nature makes people chain themselves to trees, parade naked to protest the fur trade, sail in rough seas to stop whale killing, climb oil rigs to protest drilling etc.

Now in Iceland, a group of environmentalists (lead by the NGO “Friends of the lava” are passionate about protecting a lava field, close to Reykjavík called Gálgahraun (Gallow-lava), from being dug up and buried under major roadworks. Some people might think this very odd. Why protect a small piece of lava since Iceland has so much of it? There is lava pretty much everywhere! There are a number of reasons why this particular lava field is unique and should be kept unspoiled. This lava was formed in the eruption of Búrfell, 8000 years ago and is protected by law. This beautiful lava field is mostly intact, and contains amazing geological features and old historical paths used by our ancestors. It also has a strong resonance for cultural reasons, as our best known painter, Jóhannes Kjarval, used scenes from the Gálgahraun lava field as inspiration for some of his famous paintings. Furthermore, it is one of the last unspoiled lava fields within the greater Reykjavík area. What upsets people about the situation is that the planned (and possibly illegal) road construction is completely unnecessary. It will only serve a low number of people (Álftanes has a population of 2.484) and the road construction will cost a fortune (approx 6 million Euros). The argument put forward for the new road layout is that the old road has caused accidents because of icing but out of 44 roads within the greater Reykjavík area, 21 roads were considered more dangerous than the Álftanes road, and of 1427 roads in the whole country, 301 roads have more accidents than Álftanes road. The road could be improved and made much safer for a fraction of what the new road would cost. I don’t know exactly what drives the municipality of Garðabær and The Icelandic Road and Coastal Administration to pursue this insane road construction but something about the whole thing stinks very badly.

Four nature NGO’s have sued the municipality to halt the road construction, but have not been able to change the planned work and the lawsuit is still being processed in court. In the last weeks hundreds of people have been protecting the lava field and they set up a rota to make sure there was always someone in the lava field protecting it from the bulldozers. These brave people are making a human shield to protect something they love. Today, the police started dragging them away and are carrying them handcuffed like they were the criminals. On days like these it doesn’t feel like Iceland is a country of law and order anymore.

If you want to help in any way, you can either show up in Gálgahraun and protest or transfer a donation to their bank account number: 140 05 71017, kennitala. 480207 – 1490. All help is greatly appreciated.

Addition at 13:30 on 21st of October: I just came from Gálgahraun and the bulldozers are already ruining this amazing lava field. Dozens of people have been arrested, there is police everywhere and we all (even the police) stood there horrified watching the screaming bulldozer tear down delicate lava features. The people responsible will stop at nothing, their greed has no limits.

Update in February 2014: Gálgahraun lavafield has been destroyed and the court cases against its defenders have commenced. All are charged for “disobeying police orders”. (S.I .Ed.)

Secrets and Lies: Undercover Police Operations Raise More Questions than Answers

solskin — Tue, 24 Sep 2013 18:01:06 +0000

Chris Jones, Statewatch

British police officers undercover in protest movements have been shown to have regularly operated outside the UK. Activists, lawyers and MPs have all called for an independent public inquiry in order to reveal the full extent of the practice.

Two-and-a-half years after the unmasking of Mark Kennedy and other police spies in protest movements, new information has emerged that reveals the extent to which police forces across Europe colluded in their deployment. Accusations have been made that police infiltrators were at the forefront of planning protests, acting as agent provocateurs. European law enforcement agencies coordinated these activities in secretive, unaccountable transnational working groups. Police officers formed long-term, intimate relationships with activists, had children with them, and became part of their extended families. The identities of dead children were stolen to create cover “legends.”

Rather than provide answers, this information has given rise to more questions:

• On what grounds was infiltration authorised?

• Did national police forces have knowledge of foreign undercover officers operating on their territory and, if so, did they benefit from information obtained by those officers?

• Is forming relationships with “targets” – including having children with them – official state policy?

• To what extent are undercover deployments demonstrative of coordinated European police operations?

• How many – if any – of the groups infiltrated by undercover agents can be said to warrant such levels of intrusion, and how is this assessed?

Legal challenges and political inquiries have been made – and are ongoing – in an attempt to find answers to some of these questions. Official reviews have been carried out in a number of countries, but those that have been made public – for example in Iceland and the UK – have been condemned as lacklustre and shallow by political activists, journalists and elected representatives. [1] The majority of these reviews have been kept secret, providing no answers to those affected by the actions of undercover officers, while those who authorised and took part in the operations have yet to be called to account. While officials may have occasionally wrung their hands and expressed concern, no heads have rolled – yet. [2]

Repeated calls have been made in the UK for an independent public inquiry into the use of police spies to infiltrate movements, including by a former Director of Public Prosecutions, Ken Macdonald, which have so far been resisted. [3] This article illustrates significant collusion amongst European police forces and arguably only a Europe-wide inquiry, for example by the European Parliament, can go some way towards establishing the extent to which authorities across the continent have undermined civil liberties and human rights.

Operation Herne: 40 Years of Undercover Operations

The largest official review to date is the Metropolitan Police’s Operation Herne, an inquiry that claims to be examining every undercover operation undertaken by the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS), a now-disbanded Metropolitan Police unit that was established after anti-Vietnam war protests in 1968 and operated until 2008. Giving evidence to parliament’s Home Affairs Committee in February this year, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Patricia Gallan told MPs sitting as part of the Home Affairs Committee (HAC):

I must stress we are looking at the activities of a unit… which was initially funded by the Home Office and set up in 1968 and ran for 40 years. There is not a dusty file sitting somewhere within Scotland Yard that we can pull out that will provide all the answers. There are more than 50,000 documents, paper and electronic, that we need to sift through. [4]

Gallan said 31 staff – 20 police officers and 11 police staff – are working on the review and that “the estimated cost to date has been £1.25 million.” The police recently admitted that Herne will take approximately three years to complete. MPs sitting on the Committee expressed disquiet at the cost and the time that the review has so far taken and were particularly critical of undercover police officers building “legends” from the stolen identities of dead children.

The Guardian reported in February that the Metropolitan Police “stole the identities of an estimated 80 dead children and issued fake passports in their names for use by undercover officers.” It was a practice that began in 1968 but which the Met said was not “currently” authorised. The Met subsequently announced an investigation – part of Operation Herne – into “past arrangements for undercover identities used by SDS officers.” [5] Deputy Assistant Commissioner Gallan told the HAC that prior to the Guardian article she knew of only one stolen identity, which she had found out about in September 2012. However, as far back as March 2010 ‘Officer A’ (now known in the press by his cover name Pete Black) told The Guardian that obtaining a cover identity involved “applying for the birth certificate of someone who died at an early age and using this to fabricate a cover story.” [6] The police have yet to contact any of the families of the children whose identities were used by the police. [7]

“Ghoulish and Disrespectful”

The HAC published its report on undercover policing in early March 2013 concluding that the use of dead infants’ identities was “ghoulish and disrespectful” and “abhorrent”, stating that “it must never occur again.” The committee demanded not only that the investigation (and Operation Herne as a whole) be “expedited with all possible haste”, but that “once the identity of the senior responsible leaders has been established, the matter should be referred directly to the IPCC [Independent Police Complaints Commission], which should then investigate the matter itself.” The investigation remains in the hands of the police.

Two days after Gallan gave evidence to the HAC, Met Commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe replaced her with Chief Constable Mick Creedon of Derbyshire Police “because he believed that public confidence would best be preserved by appointing an independent chief constable.” [8] The HAC noted that “senior leaders were aware of these issues [i.e. objectivity and independence] for several months before the change in leadership” and that “it is important that in future objectivity is ensured from the outset and not only when an operation comes under scrutiny.” Creedon’s most notable public statement on Herne so far relates to the use of dead children’s identities. He admitted in a letter to the HAC that it was “common practice.” [9]

The appointment of a high-ranking police officer from a different force does not guarantee that Operation Herne will get to the truth of the matter. Even were the IPCC given full responsibility for the investigation – rather than simply a “supervisory” role as is currently the case – based on past experience, many would question its ability to carry out its work impartially, even if it is soon to be awarded new powers and access to increased resources. [10] Those who make complaints against the police have found themselves frustrated with the IPCC; its ineffectiveness is one reason why so many people – from political activists to the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Assembly and Association – have demanded an independent public inquiry into the undercover policing saga. As The Guardian’s Rob Evans put it:

This [Herne] appears to be a review of 40 years of undercover operations covering serious allegations of misconduct, but the public is being told nothing about what is going on. Like all the other 11 inquiries set up following disclosures surrounding the police spies, it is being held behind closed doors, with no input from those who were affected by the spying. It is a far cry from an over-arching full public inquiry which many including former DPP [Director of Public Prosecutions], Ken MacDonald, have called for, but there are no prizes for guessing what the authorities would prefer. [11]

Legal Challenge: Police Obtain Secret Hearing

An ongoing court case has reinforced the perception that the authorities would prefer as little transparency and accountability as possible. In December 2011, eight women announced that they were bringing a court case against the Metropolitan Police for the actions of five officers: Mark Kennedy, Jim Boyling, Bob Lambert, Mark Jenner, and John Dines. A statement issued that month said:

The five undercover officers were all engaged in infiltrating environmental and social justice campaign groups between the mid 1980’s and 2010 and had relationships with the women lasting from 7 months and the longest spanning 9 years.

The women assert that the actions of the undercover officers breached their rights as protected by the European Convention on Human Rights, including Article 3 (no one shall be subject to inhumane or degrading treatment) and Article 8 (respect for private and family life, including the right to form relationships without unjustified interference by the state). The women are also seeking [common law] claims for deceit, assault, misfeasance in public office and negligence, and seek to highlight and prevent the continuation of psychological, emotional and sexual abuse of campaigners and others by undercover police officers. [12]

In January 2013, an initial hearing in the High Court (AKJ and others v Commissioner of the Police for the Metropolis and Association of Chief Police Officers) ruled in favour of an application by the Met for some parts of the case to be heard in the secretive Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT). [13] The IPT was established as part of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA); legislation that is supposed to provide a legal framework for state surveillance and undercover operations. In hearings before the tribunal “complainants do not see the evidence from the state and have no automatic right to an oral hearing. Neither can they appeal against its decision.” [14] All eight complainants are bringing claims under common law, but only three of them – those who suffered violations after 2000, when the Human Rights Act came into force – can bring human rights claims. They will have to go through the IPT before their common law claims are heard. Solicitor Harriet Wistrich explained after the case: “there is nothing to stop us proceeding with the claims on behalf of the other five claimants.” However,she notes that “given the approach by the police so far, they may apply to strike out our case on different grounds.” [15]

Mr Tugendhat used the sexual adventures of Ian Fleming’s fictional spy James Bond to reason why parliament, when enacting RIPA, would have had intimate sexual relationships in mind as something that may be used by spies. Tugendhat said that:

James Bond is the most famous fictional example of a member of the intelligence services who used relationships with women to obtain information, or access to persons or property. Since he was writing a light entertainment, Ian Fleming did not dwell on the extent to which his hero used deception, still less upon the psychological harm he might have done to the women concerned. But fictional accounts (and there are others) lend credence to the view that the intelligence and police services have for many years deployed both men and women officers to form personal relationships of an intimate sexual nature (whether or not they were physical relationships) in order to obtain information or access… In the 1980s and the 1990s, when RIPA and other statutes were passing through Parliament, everyone in public life would, in my view, have assumed, whether rightly or wrongly, that the intelligence services and the police did from time to time deploy officers as CHIS [covert human intelligence sources] in this way.” [16]

The ruling was condemned by the women who brought the case:

[W]e want to see an end to sexual and psychological abuse of campaigners for social justice and others by undercover police officers. We are outraged that the High Court has allowed the police to use the IPT to preserve the secrecy of their abusive and manipulative operations in order to prevent public scrutiny and challenge. In comparison, the privacy of citizens spied on by secret police is being given no such protection, which is contrary to the principles we would expect in a democratic society. It is unacceptable that state agents can cultivate intimate and long lasting relationships with political activists in order to gain so called intelligence on political movements. We intend to continue this fight. [17]

There have been some positive legal developments following the exposure of police infiltration of the environmental movement. In July 2012, after the Ratcliffe-on-Soar case in which 20 convictions were overturned when it was revealed that the prosecution had not disclosed to the defence evidence gathered by Mark Kennedy, the Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer, stated that “he had concerns about the safety of the convictions following the Drax power station protest in 2008,” after which 29 people were convicted for halting a train that was carrying coal to the power station. [18] He invited them to appeal, a process which is ongoing. Potential appeals against convictions in other cases are also being considered.

On the whole, however, the law does not seem to be working in favour of activists who have been spied upon. ‘Alison’ (not her real name), one of those who is part of the case recounted above, told the HAC that she submitted to the Metropolitan Police a subject access request under the Data Protection Act, a right intended to allow people to know – with exceptions – what information is held on them by organisations, whether public or private. She was told in a response that “the Commissioner has no information on [her] that he is required to supply.”

The ongoing commitment of the Metropolitan police to secrecy over the undercover infiltration saga is reflected elsewhere. Jenny Jones, a Green Party member of the elected London Assembly, said earlier this year that the Met had been “deliberately obstructive” following her efforts to obtain answers on a number of issues related to undercover officers. The police said in one letter to Jones that ongoing legal proceedings and “the covert nature of undercover policing” meant they were “not prepared to put much of the information you seek in the public domain.” [19] Given that disturbing revelations about undercover policing continue to emerge, it seems that secrecy is as much a damage limitation exercise as it is an attempt to ensure that police infiltration tactics remain covert.

Questions Across Europe

Mark Kennedy is believed to be the best-travelled of the police’s former undercover operatives, having been to Ireland, Germany, Spain, Denmark, France, the USA, Italy, and Iceland, amongst other places. [20] His exposure led to demands in many of those countries for official information about his activities, but as will be demonstrated, in most cases this has not been forthcoming or failed to reveal anything substantial. What some of these enquiries have revealed is that authorities across Europe appear to be collaborating to ensure that as little substantive information as possible comes to light on undercover police operations.

Ireland

A report drawn up by the Garda Síochána in the months following Kennedy’s exposure as a spy has never been published. Kennedy spent a significant amount of time in Ireland, participating in workshops and demonstrations, including those against the EU summit in May 2004. [21] In January 2011 the Irish Examiner reported claims that, for the summit, Kennedy “brought a van from Britain containing crash helmets and offered to purchase broom handles to be used in combating gardaí.” An activist who played host to Kennedy said that “he was always very supportive of ‘direct action’ protest. It’s disturbing that he would seem to have been acting as a ‘agent provocateur’ attempting to get people into trouble.” [22]

Days later, the Examiner again reported on Kennedy’s activities. Despite repeatedly telling the paper that they had “no information” on the case, it was reported that “Garda bosses will admit in a report to Justice Minister Brendan Smith that they knew about [Kennedy’s] presence [in Ireland].” The Examiner revealed that “senior Garda intelligence officers – attached to the Crime and Security Branch – had known all along about Mr Kennedy after being informed by the British Metropolitan police. Crime and Security did not inform local senior gardaí in the areas where Kennedy was active for fear of blowing his cover.” [23] In April 2011, a Sinn Fein representative in the Dáil, the Irish parliament, complained that “we have still to receive a report on what exactly he was doing in this country, on whose behalf he was working and whether the Gardaí were aware that he was here.” It appears that this report reached only a very limited number of officials. [24]

Iceland

In Iceland, the National Security Unit of the National Commissioner published a report on Kennedy’s activities in the country in May 2011. It included details of his infiltration of the environmental group Saving Iceland between 2005 and 2007. The Reykjavík Grapevine [25] noted that Kennedy undertook:

[P]roactive investigations to collect information in order to prevent possible actions…the Iceland police did not have such powers in 2005 and still do not. That should have made any local cooperation with the British spy illegal, just as any other proactive spying initiative would have been.

Saving Iceland was less than impressed with the report: “we have to express our astonishment if Ögmundur Jónasson, the Minister of the Interior, is going to accept as valid the poorly reasoned cover-ups that are resorted to by the report’s authors.” According to Saving Iceland, the report says that:

During an overhaul of data at the National Commissioner’s office, no information came to light that makes it possible to ascertain if [Mark Kennedy] was here in Iceland with the knowledge of the police or with their collaboration in 2005. [26]

Saving Iceland criticised the report and argued that neither the Minister of the Interior nor the National Commissioner had answered questions from their lawyer seeking further information on police surveillance of the group and clarification of the specific wording of the terms of reference given by the Interior Ministry to the National Commissioner. The group said that it is clear that the authors “entirely avoid answering the questions about Saving Iceland and Mark Kennedy that it was reportedly supposed to answer.” Furthermore:

It is clear that the National Commissioner admits to have worked closely with the British authorities concerning the surveillance of Saving Iceland. He also admits to have received information not only from abroad but also from within Iceland. This information has been gathered by spying, in other words: by violating the privacy of our personal lives. To state that no recorded documents can be found in the offices of the National Commissioner about this cooperation with the British authorities is nothing but obvious evasions.

Germany

In Germany, where both Mark Kennedy and a spy still known only by his cover name Mark Jacobs were deployed a number of times, parliamentary representatives for Die Linke have repeatedly made use of the right to ask extended questions of the Federal Government to obtain further information on the activities of individual undercover operatives and international police networks engaged in infiltration and surveillance. These efforts have yielded significant new information. Most recently the German Interior Ministry stated that entering into sexual relationships as part of an investigation is not permitted in any area of the Federal Government’s responsibility, a stipulation that also applies to foreign police agents operating in Germany. However, questions have also frequently been answered with the statement: “For reasons of confidentiality, the Federal Government is not able to respond to these questions in the part of the answer to this minor interpellation that is intended for publication.” [27]

Die Linke MP Andrej Hunko wrote to the British Home Secretary Theresa May in February 2013 outlining the German government’s acknowledgement that no undercover officers operating on German territory can lawfully engage in sexual relationships, and stated that the German Interior Ministry and the Federal police (Bundeskriminalamt, BKA) must “obtain clarification from the British authorities as to whether Mark Kennedy or ‘Mark Jacobs’ also used personal and sexual relationships in Germany in order to obtain information. And the same applies to any of their fellow officers.” He also sought clarification over whether British officers may have covertly recorded conversations, because “spying operations like that require a warrant” and so there may have been “yet another infringement of the law.”

Hunko has requested that May identifies “who was responsible for ordering their deployment to Berlin and which German authorities received reports about it” so that “action may also be taken against any infringements of law by British police officers in the capital of Germany.” This is going to take some work, especially as the Berlin police have recently said that neither Kennedy nor Jacobs ever worked for them. A letter from a Berlin politician to Hunko said that “as a result of their review, the Berlin police announced that neither the former British undercover agent, Mr Mark Kennedy, nor a person named Marco Jacob had been used by the Berlin police.”

In a reply three weeks later from Damien Green, the UK’s Minister for Police and Criminal Justice, Hunko’s requests were rejected with arguments that have been used repeatedly by the police since the initial exposure of undercover officers. Green refused to confirm or deny whether ‘Mark Jacobs’ was a British undercover officer due to the fact that his identity had not been confirmed in the exceptional manner that Kennedy’s was following his exposure. He went on: “My officials and those of the Bundesministerium des Innern have already been in contact about these issues…We will ensure that the German authorities are regularly updated as to the progress of the investigation, known as Operation Herne, which is currently underway.”

In response to Hunko’s statement that it needed to be made clear under whose authority Kennedy was acting and what exactly he did whilst in Germany (potentially covertly recording conversations, for example), the minister dodged the request for assistance in establishing whether the law had been broken: “If you have evidence that German law has been broken, I would recommend you to pass it on to the Bundesministerium des Innern, who can then make an investigative request of the British police or the IPCC via the usual international diplomatic channels.” He summed up: “the current investigation and litigation must be allowed to run their course and therefore, I cannot provide you with more detail about past undercover police operations.”

France

In November 2012, lawyers acting on behalf of Yildune Lévy initiated court proceedings demanding that the French Central Directorate of Interior Intelligence (Direction central du renseignement intérieur, DCRI, akin to UK’s MI5) be forced to reveal the contents of a dossier on which criminal charges against her and a number of others are partially based. In 2008, Lévy was arrested along with Julien Coupat and seven others as part of the ‘Tarnac Nine’ affair in which they were accused of “criminal association for the purposes of terrorist activity.” [28] All were subsequently bailed. Lévy’s lawyers are demanding that a dossier compiled by the DCRI be revealed to the defence an argument that bears similarity to the Ratcliffe-on-Soar case in the UK which collapsed after it was revealed that the prosecution had failed to disclose evidence gathered by Mark Kennedy. [29] In this case too, it is alleged that information contained in the dossier “is largely based on information supplied by [Kennedy].” [30]

Lévy’s lawyers argue that the dossier submitted to the court by the DCRI does not contain any substantive evidence that could lead to the accusations against her: facts included in the dossier are not necessarily relevant to the charges; the interpretation of those facts is not necessarily correct; and the means by which those facts have been obtained is questionable. It is also argued that revealing the contents of the dossier will shed more light on the role of Mark Kennedy, who was present in Tarnac and allegedly supplied much of the information used by DCRI to bring charges against Lévy and others. As would be expected, the British authorities – in particular the National Public Order Intelligence Unit for whom Kennedy worked – were also recipients of the information obtained by Kennedy. [31] This included information gathered whilst in New York at the same time as Julien Coupat, much of which apparently also made its way to the FBI. Lévy’s lawyers argue that “access to all the elements of the dossier is an absolutely indispensable prerequisite” for obtaining a fair trial. Proceedings are ongoing.

A European Inquiry?

In the UK there have been repeated calls for an independent public inquiry into the police spies saga. Activists, MPs, the former Director of Public Prosecutions, Ken Macdonald, and the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Assembly and Association, Maina Kiai, have all made the argument that only an open and independent public inquiry will reveal the full extent of the practice. In January 2013, Kiai said:

The case of Kennedy and other undercover officers is shocking as the groups in question were not engaged in criminal activities. The duration of this infiltration, and the resultant trauma and suspicion it has caused, are unacceptable in a democracy. [32]

Police and politicians have so far failed to be moved by such statements, saying that ongoing legal proceedings and Operation Herne must be allowed to conclude before any action can be considered. Mick Creedon, the officer now in charge of Herne, has told MPs that the inquiry “will last at least another three years.” [33] Even then, much of the report is unlikely to be made public. Deputy Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Craig Mackey told the London Assembly’s Police and Crime Committee in October last year: “I don’t know what will be in there, I don’t know what the scope will be…So there may be things that are perfectly acceptable to put in the public domain. There may be other parts…that cannot be.” [34]

While an inquiry in the UK would go some way to establishing exactly what the role of the UK’s police forces and state authorities in infiltrating protest movements over decades has been, it is clear that British authorities have undertaken significant collaborative efforts with their foreign counterparts, a point that raises troubling legal issues. There is much that remains unknown about the remit and powers of international police networks such as the European Cooperation Group on Undercover Activities, the Cross-Border Surveillance Working Group and the International Working Group on Undercover Policing. [35] Meanwhile, the more formal forum of the Council of the European Union has been used in the past to discuss different national legal frameworks for the deployment of undercover officers and to find ways of overcoming obstacles. [36] The German and UK delegations to the Council have also lobbied for undercover deployments to be removed from the scope of the European Investigation Order – their inclusion would have gone some way to harmonising the legal framework and potentially increasing parliamentary accountability. (Even if they were included it is unclear whether the European Investigation Order is a desirable piece of legislation. One analysis argues that “many of the changes proposed to the current legal framework would constitute a reduction in human rights protection and even…an attack on the national sovereignty of Member States.”) [37]

The deficiencies of reports issued and enquiries undertaken so far at national level has led to an ongoing effort to try and establish some form of Europe-wide inquiry, perhaps via the European Parliament. Such an initiative is not without precedent – the European Parliament undertook a major inquiry into the CIA’s rendition operations which went some way towards uncovering the extent of European state complicity in the USA’s global kidnap and torture programme. One problem such an inquiry would have is its inability to compel individuals or agencies to provide evidence. As has been demonstrated, those involved in directing and carrying out the infiltration of protest movements have not been keen to release information about it. European parliamentary questions to the Council and Commission are being prepared on the issue of accountability under national, European and international law for human rights violations committed by undercover police officers. This may be the first step on a long road towards stitching together what is currently a patchwork of attempts across Europe to obtain answers and accountability.
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Undercover Cops Uncovered

The following is a list of undercover officers involved in infiltrating and disrupting protest movements and social justice campaigns who have been exposed in the last few years. The first name listed is their cover name. If there is a name in brackets, it is the individual’s real name. It is worth noting that the Metropolitan Police have only officially acknowledged that Mark Kennedy was an undercover police officer; they refuse to do so for any other individual.

Bob Robinson (Robert/Bob Lambert) [38]

Infiltrated London Greenpeace and the Animal Liberation Front from 1984-88. Had a child with one of his “targets”. Has been accused in parliament by Caroline Lucas MP of participating in an arson attack on a department store. Later promoted to Head of Operations in the Special Demonstration Squad. Went on to run Special Branch’s Muslim Contact Unit. Awarded MBE for services to policing. Currently works as an academic at St Andrews University.

Jim Sutton (Andrew James Boyling) [39]

Infiltrated Reclaim the Streets from 1995-2000. Formed a relationship with a “target”, disappeared, and resurfaced a year later admitting to the woman that he was a police officer. They married and had two children but divorced in 2009.

John Barker (John Dines) [40]

Infiltrated a number of groups including London Greenpeace and squatting groups between 1987 and 1992. Had a five-year relationship with one of his “targets”.

Lynn Watson [41]

Based in Leeds, from 2003-08 she infiltrated numerous environmental, anti-capitalist and peace groups: Aldermaston Women’s Peace Camp, UK Action Medics Collective, Drax Climate Camp, Dissent! and others.

Mark Cassidy (Mark Jenner) [42]

Infiltrated the Colin Roach Centre, the Building Workers Group, Hackney Community Defence Association and, allegedly, Anti- Fascist Action and Red Action between 1995 and 2000. Had a four-year relationship with a woman now known publicly as ‘Alison’. Bob Lambert was his boss.

Simon Wellings [47]

Was exposed after five years with the group Globalise Resistance (2001-05) when he accidentally phoned an activist friend whilst discussing photos of and information on the group with officers at a police station.

Mark Stone (Mark Kennedy) [44]

Spent seven years undercover, from 2003 until exposure in October 2010 by former friends and comrades. Travelled far and wide across the UK and Europe and worked with groups such as Dissent!, Rising Tide, Saving Iceland, Workers’ Solidarity Movements, Rossport Solidarity, Climate Camp, Climate Justice Action and others.

Peter Daley/Pete Black (Peter Francis) [45]

Infiltrated anti-racist and anti-road campaigns between 1993 and 1997 and slept with two activists during that time. He was in Special Branch before joining the Special Demonstration Squad where he used the identity of a four-year old who had died of leukaemia as his cover. His real name is unknown but he went to the press with stories of his time as an undercover officer in March 2010, before the exposure of Mark Kennedy in October.

Rod Richardson [46]

Infiltrated anti-capitalist and hunt saboteur groups, in particular working with groups protesting against political summits such as the G20. Went abroad to Sweden, France and Italy at various times.

Mark/Marco Jacobs [43]

Operated from 2004 to 2009, infiltrated anarchist, anti-militarist and migration campaigns. Travelled abroad to Germany and France (on a number of occasions with Mark Kennedy).

Unnamed Officer

Cover name and real name unknown, but was noted in a January 2012 article in the Guardian that outlined Bob Lambert’s fathering of a child with an activist. The article said that he was “sent to spy on activists some years ago” and “had a short-lived relationship with a political activist which produced a child.” After leaving the relationship and the child, he used ongoing police monitoring reports to “regularly read details of her life,” watching “as she grew older and brought up their child as a single parent.” [48]
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Endnotes

[1] See notes [3], [4], [11], [19], [24], [25], [26], [32], [35]

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ken Macdonald, Police undercover work has gone badly wrong. We need a public inquiry, The Guardian, 4.2.13: http://www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2013/feb/04/police-ipcc

[4] House of Commons Home Affairs Committee, Undercover Policing: Interim Report, 26.2.13: http://www.statewatch.org/news/2013/mar/…

[5] Paul Lewis and Rob Evans, Police spies stole identities of dead children, The Guardian, 3.2.13: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/feb/03…

[6] Tony Thompson, Inside the lonely and violent world of the Yard’s elite undercover unit, The Guardian, 14.3.10: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/mar/14…

[7] Heather Saul, Families of dead children whose identities were used by undercover police have not been informed, The Independent, 16.7.13: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/cri…

[8] Ibid. at [4] Informants, spies and subversion 21

[9] Jamie Grierson, Dead children’s names used as aliases by undercover police at Scotland Yard, The Independent, 17.5.13: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/cri…

[10] Alan Travis, Theresa May to expand IPCC in crackdown on police corruption, The Guardian, 12.2.13: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2013/…

[11] Rob Evans, Secretive review into claim that police spy set fire to Debenhams, The Guardian, 25.6.12: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/undercover-…

[12] Legal action against Metropolitan police, Police Spies Out of Lives, 16.12.11: http://policespiesoutoflives.org.uk/lega…

[13] [2013] EWHC 32 (QB), High Court Judgment, 17.1.13: http://www.statewatch.org/news/2013/jan/…

[14] Paul Lewis and Rob Evans, Police spies court case suggests sexual relations with activists were routine, The Guardian, 17.1.13: http://www. guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/jan/17/spies-sexual-relations-activists-routine

[15] Harriet Wistrich, Explaining the judgment over secret tribunal, Police Spies Out of Lives, 23.1.13: http://policespiesoutoflives.org.uk/expl…

[16] Ibid. at [13]

[17] Outrage as High Court permits Secrecy over Undercover Policing, Police Spies Out of Lives, 17.1.13: http://policespiesoutoflives.org.uk/outr…

[18] Keir Starmer QC invites Drax power station protesters to appeal, BBC News, 3.7.12: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-yor…

[19] Getting answers from the police on undercover deployments “will be a long process”, Statewatch News Online, January 2013: http://database.statewatch.org/article.a…

[20] Mark Kennedy: A chronology of his activities, Powerbase: http://www. powerbase.info

[21] Scott Millar, Questions remain over undercover activists, Irish Examiner, 22.1.11: http://www.irishexaminer.com/archives/20…

[22] Ibid.

[23] Cormac O’Keeffe and Scott Millar, Presence of undercover officer ‘known to Gardai’, Irish Examiner, 26.1.11: http://www.irishexaminer.com/ireland/pre…

[24] Daíl debates, 19.4.11: http://oireachtasdebates.oireachtas.ie/d…

[25] Snorri Páll Jónsson Úlfhildarson, Back to the future, The Reykjavík Grapevine, 21.5.12: http://grapevine.is/Home/ReadArticle/BAC…

[26] Covers-ups and evasions condoned by the Minister of the Interior, Saving Iceland, 20.5.11: http://www.savingiceland.org/2011/05/cov…

[27] German Bundestag, Answer of the Federal Government, 31.5.12: http:// www.statewatch.org

[28] U.S. support committee for the Tarnac 9 formed, Infoshop News, 30.9.08: http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?sto…

[29] Danny Chivers, Undercover and over-the-top: The collapse of the Ratcliffe trial, New Internationalist Magazine, 12.1.11: http://newint.org/features/web-exclusive…

[30] L’espion anglais qui a piégé le groupe de Tarnac, Le Monde, 8.11.12: http://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/20…

[31] Camille Poloni (translation into English by Élodie Chatelais), Mark Kennedy: A mole in Tarnac: http://euro-police.noblogs.org/2012/04/m…

[32] UN Special Rapporteur calls for a “judge-led public inquiry” into undercover police operations and condemns a number of other police practices, Statewatch News Online, January 2013: http://database.statewatch.org/article.a…

[33] Rob Evans and Paul Lewis, Police spies’ use of dead children’s identities was common, MPs told, The Guardian, 17.5.13: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/may/17…

[34] Ibid. at [19]

[35] See the Statewatch News Online coverage of these groups for more information: Parliamentary questions in Germany reveal further information on European police project aimed at enhancing covert investigative techniques, November 2012: http://database.statewatch.org/article.a…; Another secretive European police working group revealed as governments remain tight-lipped on other police networks and the activities of Mark Kennedy, August 2012: http://database.statewatch.org/article.a…; Parliamentary scrutiny unveils undercover “secret police networks”, February 2012: http://database.statewatch.org/article.a…

[36] Overview of replies to questionnaire on undercover officers – texts of national legislation: http://database.statewatch.org/article.a…; Undercover police: Latest: Overview of replies to questionnaire on undercover officers: http://database.statewatch.org/article.a…

[37] Steve Peers, The proposed European Investigation Order: Assault on human rights and national sovereignty, Statewatch analysis, May 2010: http://www.statewatch.org/analyses/no-96…

[38] Rob Evans and Paul Lewis, Progressive academic Bob Lambert is former police spy, The Guardian, 16.10.11: http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/oct/1…

[39] Paul Lewis, Rob Evans and Rowenna Davis, Ex-wife of police spy tells how she fell in love and had children with him, The Guardian, 19.1.11: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2…

[40] Amelia Hill, Paul Lewis and Rob Evans, Brother of boy whose identity was stolen by police spies demands apology, The Guardian, 6.2.13: http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/feb/0…

[41] Rajeev Syal and Martin Wainwright, Undercover police: Officer A named as Lynn Watson, The Guardian, 19.1.11: http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/jan/1…

[42] Paul Lewis and Rob Evans, Police spies: in bed with a fictional character, The Guardian, 1.3.13: http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/mar/0…

[43] Rajeev Syal, Undercover police: Officer B identified as Mark Jacobs, The Guardian, 19.1.11: http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/jan/1…

[44] Rob Evans and Paul Lewis, Undercover officer spied on green activists, The Guardian, 9.1.11: http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/jan/0…

[45] Stephen Wright and Richard Pendlebury, SPECIAL INVESTIGATION: A very troubled undercover cop and growing doubts over the police ‘plot’ to smear the Lawrence family, Daily Mail, 19.7.13: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-…

[46] Paul Lewis and Rob Evans, Rod Richardson: the mystery of the protester who was not who he claimed, The Guardian, 6.2.13: http://www. theguardian.com

[47] Meirion Jones and Anna Adams, Undercover police work revealed by phone blunder, BBC News, 25.3.11: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-12867187

[48] Rob Evans and Paul Lewis, Undercover police had children with activists, The Guardian, 20.1.12: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/jan/20…

The Mark Kennedy Saga – Chapter Iceland

friendoficeland — Thu, 12 Sep 2013 16:15:54 +0000

Snorri Páll Jónsson Úlfhildarson Grapevine

Each time a free-floating rumour gets confirmed, and past political behaviour becomes a scandalous spectacle, one cannot resist wondering if such conduct might be going on today. This was the case in 2006, after a grand exposure of espionage the Icelandic state aimed at socialists during the Cold War. During parliamentary discussions following the revelation, Mörður Árnason, MP for the Social-Democratic Alliance (“Samfylkingin”), highlighted the importance of revealing if similar espionage was indeed occurring in present times. If so, he asked, “how is it being conducted? […] Which foreign states have been able to access this information?” Quite typically, those questions were never answered.

Half a decade later, in late 2010, it was revealed that a British police officer, one Mark Kennedy, had travelled around Europe for seven years disguised as environmental and anti-capitalist activist ‘Mark Stone’ and was collecting information about various activist movements and, in some cases, acting as an agent provocateur. Along with the UK, Denmark, Germany, Italy and France — to name but a few of the places where he worked — he did a stint in Iceland’s Eastern highlands in the summer of 2005. In Iceland, he attended a protest camp organised by the environmentalist movement Saving Iceland which targeted the construction of the gargantuan Kárahnjúkar dam and American aluminium giant Alcoa’s smelter in Reyðarfjörður.

The revelation mostly stayed within activist circles and publications, until early 2011, when a public expose of the spy’s true identity lead to the collapse of a UK trial against six climate-change activists, in which Mark’s secretly obtained evidence played a key role. British newspaper The Guardian then took up the case, and the Mark Kennedy saga started to snowball contemporaneously with the broader attention it received, bringing to light a number of other undercover spies.

Sex, Secrecy And Dead Children’s Identities

Shortly after Mark was exposed, Irish and German authorities admitted that he had worked within their jurisdictions and with their knowledge. Due to the ongoing efforts of Andrej Hunko — MP for German left party Die Linke — a truckload of information regarding European cross-border undercover police operations has since seen the light of day.

A recent book on the matter, written by Guardian journalists Paul Lewis and Rob Evans, brings further context to the affair — the mapping of at least 30 years of police espionage and infiltration of environmentalist, anti-racist and anarchist movements in the UK and elsewhere. Among the information revealed, the authors explain how the undercover officers at the Special Demonstration Squad — the undercover unit responsible for the infiltration — had the modus operandi of taking up identities of dead children in order to build up credible alter-egos based on the short lives of real persons.

It has also been revealed that Kennedy — along with others in his position — enjoyed several intimate relationships with some of his prospects, using sex to build up trust and gather information. One infiltrator, Bob Lambert, even fathered a child with one of these women, only to disappear as soon as his undercover employment became too risky. Eight British women who were victims of this tactic have pressed charges against the spies’ employer, the Metropolitan Police, due to the psychological damage they suffered. In a recent episode of investigative TV programme ‘Dispatches’ on Channel 4, some of them described their experience as having been mass-raped by the state, as they would never have consented to sleeping with the police officers had they been aware of their real identities. Adding insult to injury, their claims will not be heard openly — the British High Court recently ruled that it would take place in the secret Investigatory Powers Tribunal.

Saving Hell’s Angels

Enter Iceland, where the big question concerned whether Mark Kennedy had operated with or without the Icelandic authorities’ knowledge and approval. According to the country’s penal code, a foreign party or state’s espionage that takes place within the jurisdiction of the Icelandic state — or is directed at something or someone therein — is illegal and punishable with five-years imprisonment. Had Mark operated without the authorities’ knowledge, it should have caused an international conflict. If he, on the other hand, collaborated with the Icelandic police, it would have equaled the invoking of proactive investigative powers, which the Icelandic police apparently didn’t have at that time.*

Thus the affair entered Iceland’s parliament in late January 2011. Assuming the former version being more likely than the latter, the above-mentioned MP Mörður Árnason asked his fellow party-member and then-Minister for Foreign Affairs, Össur Skarphéðinsson, about the government’s possible actions regarding the matter. After a few lousy personal jokes thrown between the two, Össur claimed he would wait for a report on the matter — conducted by the National Commissioner of the Icelandic Police — which Ögmundur Jónasson, MP for the Left Greens and then Minister of the Interior, had already requested.

But when finally published by the Commissioner’s National Security Unit in May 2011, it was pretty much impossible to estimate the relevance of the report, as the details of Ögmundur’s request were never made public. It was, however, clear that the National Commissioner — whose report literally equated environmentalist activists with Hells Angels — wasn’t about to bring any concrete information out into the public domain.

Lost In Information

Although admitting that the police received information about the activists and their plans via domestic and foreign sources, and that the Icelandic police collaborated with foreign police authorities regarding the protests, the report’s authors nevertheless fully dodged the question regarding the Icelandic police’s alleged collaboration with Mark Kennedy. The main conclusion of the report merely found that “during an overhaul of data at the National Commissioner’s office, no information has come forth enabling an answer regarding whether this agent provocateur […] was here in collaboration with or without the knowledge of the Icelandic police in 2005.”

Despite criticism from Saving Iceland and Árni Finnsson, head of the Iceland Nature Conservation Association, which both accused the minister of condoning cover-ups and evasions by accepting these results, Ögmundur never really touched officially on the issue again. Neither did Össur nor Mörður or — as a matter of fact — anyone else from the establishment.

The truth regarding Kennedy’s operations in Iceland is still not publicly acknowledged, and the absurdity of the issue as it now stands is probably best described by Ögmundur’s own words, taken from an article published on Smugan — a now defunct leftist news-site — and his last public remark on the report: “The National Commissioner’s report states that the Icelandic police obtained information from abroad concerning the protests at Kárahnjúkar, but that the police do not have information about how this information was obtained.”

—

* It is, in fact, questionable if the Iceland police had proactive investigative powers or not. As a result of weak laws and a lack of regulations, it actually seems that until 2011 the police had just about carte blanche regarding whom to spy on and for what reason. See more about it here.

—

Click here to go to the support site for the women’s legal action against the Metropolitan Police.

Watch the above-mentioned Dispatches show here below:

The Police’s Dirty Secret (47mins – Dispatches/Channel4 – 24JUN2013) from Casey Oliver on Vimeo.

Iceland Inside Fortress Europe? — Undercover Operations, Controlling Unwanted Migration and Policing the Cyberspace

solskin — Sun, 15 Jul 2012 13:58:20 +0000

Saving Iceland presents a talk by Matthias Monroy, journalist and political activist from Germany, in the Reykjavík Academia, Monday July 23 at 20:00.

The Mark Kennedy case illustrated how deeply Iceland is involved in European secret police networks that have been infiltrating environmentalist, anarchist and other leftist resistance movements since the late 1990s. The exposure of the undercover policeman also showed that it is near impossible to bring illegal practises of cross-border policing to courts: It is mostly unclear, which police authority in which country is responsible. In 2005 Kennedy infiltrated the Saving Iceland campaign, which resisted the dams at Kárahnjúkar in Iceland’s eastern highlands. He used his Icelandic connections and experience for a European-wide speaking tour to infiltrate activist groups in numerous countries.

Iceland is also involved in policing the EU migration regime, which will start the huge surveillance network EUROSUR in two years. This satellite surveillance involving usage of drones is complemented by the “Smart Border Package” facilitating border crossing by using biometric features and other technical tools. At the same time the EU changes the Schengen Border Codex, in which Iceland is also taking part. The agreement was one of the most important achievements for free travel within the EU. Now France and Germany constrain more border controls to block international protesters or exclude countries like Greece from the Schengen system. Iceland uses the measure, for example, to control the movements of motorcycle gangs.

To block unwanted migrants crossing the Evros river between Greece and Turkey, the EU is running a research program regarding the usage of land robots for border surveillance. The EU border agency FRONTEX, for which the Icelandic Coast Guard has worked in the Mediterranean, is now operating together with the Turkish government and is helping to install a police and customs centre at the common border with Bulgaria and Greece. For the first time, this structure includes the police agency EUROPOL, whose guidelines normally exclude the fight against migration.

To the contrary, the main pillar of EUROPOL becomes the control of so called “cybercrime” and “cyberterrorism”. The agency is running large databases, surveillance technology and digital forensic tools to support the police forces of the 27 member states in cross-border operations. EUROPOL is more and more controlling alleged “suspicious” behaviour on the internet, which leads to more need of safety for cyber activists as well as all citizens.

In his talk, Monroy will explain briefly the police networks built up by the European Union concerning undercover policing, the fight against unwanted migration and cyberspace. Monroy will also attempt to explain how Iceland is involved in or affected by current and future projects.

The talk will take place in the Reykjavík Academia, which also houses Iceland’s only anarchist library, on Monday July 23 at 20:00. The Academia is located at Hringbraut 121, 107 Reykjavík. The talk will be in English and entrance is free.

For more information write to savingiceland [at] riseup.net

Saving Iceland’s archive of articles regarding the Mark Kennedy case

Matthias Monroy, journalist and political activist

Back to the Future — The Unrestricted Spying of Yesterday… and Tomorrow?

solskin — Sun, 06 May 2012 15:43:28 +0000

By Snorri Páll Jónsson Úlfhildarson, originally published in The Reykjavík Grapevine.

This simply means that until spring last year, the police literally had a carte blanche regarding whom to spy on and for whatever reasons they chose. Unbeknownst the public, the instructions allowed unrestricted espionage.

“Good things happen slowly,” Björn Bjarnason, Iceland’s former Minister of Justice, wrote on his blog in March of last year when his successor in office, Minister of the Interior Ögmundur Jónasson, called for a press conference to announce that the police would soon be granted proactive investigation powers.

While Ögmundur and other Left Green MPs often criticised Björn for his aggressive efforts to increase police powers during the latter’s six years in office, he is now advocating for increased police powers as part of The State’s crusade against purported organised crime, which is believed to be predominantly manifested in a number of motorcycle gangs, including the Hells Angels.

A bill that he proposed to parliament last month does not contain the infinite investigation powers that the police have openly asked for, but does nevertheless allow them to start investigating people who they believe are planning acts that would fall under the category of organised crime and are punishable by at least four years of imprisonment.

While the case is usually presented as the police’s struggle to gain greater justifiable investigative powers — in which they have supposedly not fully succeeded — the fact is that, from at least July 1999 to May 2011, the police had unrestricted authority to monitor whomever they wanted due to poorly defined regulations.

THE HEADLINE THAT NEVER WAS

“UNRESTRICTED SPYING WAS PERMITTED!” should have appeared as a headline all over the Icelandic media last year. Yet it was strangely absent, despite an official acknowledgement from the Minister of Interior that this was indeed the case that unrestricted spying on Icelandic citizens had been tolerated and allowed. The matter concerned Mark Kennedy, the British police spy whose seven-year long undercover operations were exposed and reported in the international media last year. Disguised as activist ‘Mark Stone,’ he travelled through Europe collecting intelligence about anarchists, environmentalist and animal rights activists. He was for instance stationed in Iceland’s eastern highlands in 2005, where environmentalist network Saving Iceland was protesting the construction of the Kárahnjúkar dams.

In most of the countries where Kennedy operated — short of Ireland and Germany — the authorities have remained silent about the matter. But a newly released report on police units providing intelligence in the UK, carried out by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC), clearly outlines the aim of the National Police Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU), for which Kennedy worked: “the main objective of the NPOIU has been gathering intelligence” such as “knowledge about the infiltrated protest groups, their aims and links with other groups, their plans and methods, and the people involved in suspected serious crime.”

In other words, using proactive investigations to collect information so as to prevent possible action.

As Minister of Foreign Affairs Össur Skarphéðinsson remarked during a parliamentary discussion about Mark Kennedy last year, the Icelandic police did not have such powers in 2005 and still do not. That should have made any co-operation with the British spy illegal, just as any other proactive spying initiative would have been.

SO MANY MEN SO MANY MINDS

Following Kennedy’s exposé, Ögmundur called for an investigation of the Icelandic police authorities’ possible knowledge or collaboration with the British spy, which resulted in a report conducted by the National Police Commissioner’s National Security Unit (NSU). The report acknowledged that information regarding the protest camp at Kárahnjúkar, its organisers and participants, was passed to the Icelandic authorities. According to the report, this information then lead to a “collaboration with foreign police authorities concerning protest groups abroad and the intended protests under the banner of Saving Iceland.”

“This is the big news,” Ögmundur declared on his blog in May 2011, after the report was published. “Espionage was employed with the Icelandic authorities’ knowledge and will.” He emphasised this point in parliament last March, stating: “The infiltrator [Kennedy] was able to operate at Kárahnjúkar because of very unclear regulations regarding the police’s investigation methods. The legislation was far from strong enough, as well as there were rules in force that never appeared in front of the public.”

The rules he mentioned are instructions by the State Prosecutor from 1999. For some background: according to laws on criminal proceedings, the respective minister — Minister of Justice until 2010, Minister of the Interior since — should pass regulations regarding specific police protocols such as the use of informers and infiltrators. But these regulations did not exist until last May following a request by the National Security Unit. Instead they were substituted by those State Prosecutor’s instructions which, due to their less formal status (compared with laws and regulations) were not published in a conspicuous manner but rather filed away in drawers and cabinets, so to speak.

Although these instructions are hard too find, they still are accessible and, according to the document, their purpose was simply to “prevent criminal activities,” for instance with the use of an informer “who supplies the police with information about criminal activities or people linked with criminal activities.” Most notably, the document’s eleven pages are free of a single definition of what criminal activities the instructions concern, unlike the regulations created last spring, which are confined to “well-founded suspicion” of acts or plans of acts that are punishable by at least eight years of imprisonment.

This simply means that until spring last year, the police literally had a carte blanche regarding whom to spy on and for whatever reasons they chose. Unbeknownst the public, the instructions allowed unrestricted espionage. These powers are now partly lost due to Mark Kennedy’s exposé and the following the NSU investigation.

THE PERMISSIONS TO COME

While admitting that he had not even seen the bill submitted by Ögmundur last month, Snorri Magnússon, Chairperson of the Police Federation of Iceland, still maintained to newspaper Fréttablaðið that the proposed permissions were too limited. Snorri explained that the police want permissions similar to what their colleagues in Scandinavia work with which allow them, as he noted, to “lawfully monitor certain groups in society though they are not necessarily about to commit crimes today or tomorrow, and collect intelligence on them, which then might lead to official cases.”

This is not included in Ögmundur’s bill, which states that in order to justify the use of proactive investigation powers, the police has to know or suspect the planning of a violation of penal code article 175a, punishable with at least four years of imprisonment. Its execution has to be an operation of an “organised crime association” defined as a “companionship of three or more persons with the main objective to systematically commit criminal acts, directly or indirectly for profit.”

The bill has only been briefly debated in parliament and has yet to go through second and third discussion before undergoing voting. But judging on the discussion in parliament last month, it will receive majority support — only members of The Movement have seriously criticised the proactive investigation powers.

One of them, Margrét Tryggvadóttir, recently pointed out that the police seem to have quite a decent overview of the given crime groups, even claiming to know their exact number of members. Along with recent admissions that for the last couple of years the police has received judicial permissions for wire-tapping in more than 99% of requested instances, this got her to question the real need for increased powers. Author and film-maker Haukur Már Helgason echoed this criticism in a series of blog posts last year, nominating “the brand name Hell’s Angels” as “the biggest favour done to expansion-greedy police force.”

Nonetheless, the police and members of three parties who together make up two thirds of parliament are asking for more. In a parliamentary proposition submitted last year they ask the Minister of the Interior to prepare another bill, this time regarding the aforementioned Scandinavian investigation powers. The proposition is currently in the midst of parliamentary process and though Ögmundur might claim he does not like it, it is questionable if he could actually resist such a majority will. Additionally, recent polls suggest that the right wing conservative Independence Party will gain a majority in the coming 2013 parliamentary elections, in which case it is certain that the police will not have to wait too long for the “good things” to happen.

Despite what has been presented by official police statements and through most media coverage, this would certainly not be an indicative of a new period of increased investigation powers. It would be a step backwards into an already realised future.

“International Activists Criminalized”

solskin — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 13:05:24 +0000

Article by Jón Bjarki Magnússon, originally published on April 4th, in Icelandic newspaper DV. Translated from Icelandic by Saving Iceland.

German MP Andrej Hunko states that European police authorities are overtly and covertly planning increased surveillance of activists

Perhaps this is no longer common knowledge, but it still is a documented fact that the police authorities in the Western world operated in such a way throughout the whole of the 20th century.

“Though we have not yet managed to change the laws, we have managed to bring attention to the cause, which is very important.” So says Andrej Hunko who lately has been struggling against police spying on people involved with social movements in Europe. Hunko, who is a MP for the German left-wing party ‘Die Linke’, is concerned about the increased use of such espionage, especially as movements located on the political left wing are increasingly labelled as “leftist extremist and terrorists groups” that “have to” be monitored closely.

“I am concerned about this development. I am utterly opposed to the systematic criminalisation of international activists.” Among other things, Hunko, who is a member of the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs of the European Parliament, points out that plans are now being made to co-ordinate the laws of the member-states of the European Union, so that police spies from one country will be able to operate in another country without the special permissions that have been required. Hunko believes that this will subvert the work of social movements in Europe. “All this is happening very quickly and without an informed discussion, neither among members of national parliaments nor among members of the European Parliament, not to mention the public in those countries.”

Espionage Permitted in Iceland

In the beginning of March, I met Hunko at his office in the German parliament. Having forgotten to bring my passport, I was at first denied entrance into the German parliament. A woman sitting at the reception shook her head with a strict expression and maintained that she could do nothing to help me. But as I stood bewildered in the building’s lobby, I was suddenly greeted by a tall, smiling man, whose gait was light, his hair long and gray. Before long the doors opened up and he invited me to come along. After passing through security guards and metal detectors we started our journey and Hunko spoke briefly about the parliament building — this huge wing that consumed the two of us as we walked up the stairs towards his office.

Those who have followed DV’s coverage about the case of Mark Kennedy, the British police spy and agent provocateur, do probably already recognize Andrej Hunko. He has continuously kept the Kennedy case in the spotlight in Europe and has demanded answers from both the German and the European Parliaments. As for a short revision, it can be mentioned that Mark Kennedy, who operated under the alias Mark Stone, infiltrated the Icelandic environmentalist movement Saving Iceland at Kárahnjúkar in 2005. There, Kennedy surveyed the group’s operations, recorded discussions, documented and gathered information, which he then passed on to the British police and possibly the Icelandic authorities as well.

An article published in DV in May last year under the title “Espionage Against Saving Iceland Permitted”, revealed that according to Icelandic laws, Kennedy was allowed to spy on Saving Iceland. This has never been refuted by the Icelandic police authorities and Hunko believes that just as the German police, the Icelandic police were aware of Kennedy’s activities.

Police-Saboteurs

During a telephone interview with DV about a year ago, Hunko stated his opinion that Kennedy’s case is a sign of the threat faced by European social movements. Now, a year later, he reiterated his concerns regarding that by using agent provocateurs like Kennedy, the police in Germany and other countries have in fact encouraged illegal actions within activist movements. In an open letter last year, Hunko appealed to the Icelandic authorities to investigate Kennedy’s operations in Iceland, wherein he mentioned that Kennedy did commit sabotage during protests in Germany and thereby broke the law. Though it has never been confirmed, it is possible that something similar happened in Iceland.

Such tactics are well known among agent provocateurs and are implemented so as to directly impact the development of protests, often to cause disturbances or to defame a particular cause. Agent provocateurs have increasingly become the topic of discussion within European and North American social movements, but such agents are rarely unveiled, as these are clear violations of the laws — something that most police authorities prefer not to be implicated with. However, Hunko points out that as Kennedy’s case has been confirmed and documented, studying it may help understanding the wider context. “It is, in fact, great that the Kennedy case merged to the surface, as now we have a confirmed example of the methods that are implemented. Nevertheless, I think we have a long way to go.”

“Travesty of Democracy”

“By planting agent provocateurs into social movements, where they directly influence the operations of these movements, the respective states have in fact started participating in the organization of political resistance. That way, they can affect the groups’ actions and defame them by violating the law, as happened in Kennedy’s case. Then we are witnessing a travesty of democracy, which in my opinion is a huge problem,” Hunko states, but he was already concerned about this development before Kennedy’s case entered public discussion last year. However, not until that particular case was exposed did international media start talking about police spying in a broader context.

Hunko explains how he had tried to bring the attention of German media to Kennedy’s case, but nothing happened until British newspaper The Guardian started reporting it. “So we needed the British media in order to reach the German media, which is a bit strange,” Hunko says and points out that in the beginning, the Kennedy case got people to seriously think about police spying within democratic societies. But today people have become indolent again. In the wake of the Kennedy scandal it was revealed that the police department that he worked for in the UK has now been disbanded. This is an example of how the wool is pulled over the eyes of the public, Hunko says, as another police department was simply established to take care of the same task.

Lack of Information

“Despite the high profile of Kennedy’ case, it is by no means the sole instance of such police espionage,” Hunko says and adds that similar examples have already surfaced in Germany. Kennedy himself has also admitted his knowledge of other spies operating in Europe. Hunko says that in the German parliament, clear rules regarding freedom of information have made it easy for him and his fellow party-members to obtain information about the case. Thus it was possible to expose the fact that the German police were fully aware of Mark Kennedy‘s presence in Germany.

“The problem, however, is that it is way more complicated to obtain such information in the European Parliament,“ Hunko says and adds that new regulations are now being created, regarding the co-operation of European police espionage departments. “I consider it one of my tasks to bring this information to the public.“

Hunko believes that the Icelandic police — just as the German police — were aware of Kennedy’s presence and intelligence-gathering in Iceland. The Icelandic police authorities have not denied this and in a report by the National Commissioner, published in May last year, it is stated that judging from “the available data”, it is not possible to make clear if Kennedy, when in Iceland, was or was not “in collaboration or with the will and knowledge of the Icelandic police.”

The report also emphasised that the police is, in fact, allowed to use spies and agent provocateurs during the investigations of criminal activities. But the report failed to fulfil its simple objective, that is to bring forward answers to questions by Iceland’s Minister of the Interior. “There is nothing in it, it is just some foam,” Birgitta Jónsdóttir, MP for Hreyfingin, said about the report. She openly asked for clear information about the Icelandic police’s possible knowledge of Kennedy’s presence in Iceland. But so far, no clear answers have appeared.

Ögmundur Wants Increased Investigation Powers

Following the report, Iceland’s Minister of the Interior, Ögmundur Jónasson, stated that law amendments were needed regarding these issues — that it was necessary to change the law in a way that it does not allow the planting of spies into groups of political dissidents. By admitting the importance of law amendments, he admitted that up until then, the police had been allowed to spy on and infiltrate political groups, due to loopholes in the body of laws. On 22 March this year, he emphasised this point in parliament, during a discussion on so-called increased police investigation powers.

It has been confirmed that when environmentalists protested against the construction of the Kárahnjúkar dams, a foreign infiltrator was planted into the group. It has been stated that this policeman violated laws and rules by his operations here and along Europe […] The infiltrator was able to operate at Kárahnjúkar because of how unclear the regulations were regarding the police’s investigation methods. The legislation was far from being strong enough and in addition to that, there were a few regulations in force that were never made available to the public. This has now been changed. About a year ago, new regulations were passed regarding the police’s special investigation methods and actions. These regulations prohibit any kind of proactive police investigations of grass-roots groups or political organizations. Thus it can be mentioned that today, an infiltrator would not be permitted to operate at Kárahnjúkar.

According to the above-stated, the minister believes that the new laws on pre-emptive investigation powers will prevent espionage of such kind. On the contrary, Hunko claims that as long as movements, located on the left-wing of politics, are still systematically labelled as “left-wing extremists and terrorist organizations”, the increased investigation powers will be used to spy on such groups, just as other “terrorist groups”. Thus it is only a matter of definition.

Well Known Methodology

When I mention how unbelievable this case has been, bringing to mind James Bond films from the 1970’s or something that took place in the Soviet Union, Hunko replies calmly: “There is nothing particularly Soviet about this. Western police authorities used spies and agent provocateurs throughout the whole 20th century, in order to infiltrate political movements that were believed to pose a threat to certain interests. What comes to mind at first is the Gladio Project, which was organized by NATO after the Second World War, with the aim of stopping the upswing of communism in Italy.”

The Gladio Project, which has been the subject of various books, was a secret army run by the CIA, the British secret service, the Pentagon and NATO. From the end of the Second World War and up until 1990, the army operated in Italy and its primary goal was to fight against the upswing of communism in West Europe by any means necessary. To that end, American and British soldiers collaborated closely with right-wing terrorists, as explained in a book by Daniele Ganser, ‘NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation GLADIO and Terrorism in Western Europe’.

“The best kept, and most damaging, political-military secret since World War II,” was one of the ways The Observer used to describe the Gladio project after its exposure in 1990, while The Times stated: “The story seems straight from the pages of a political thriller.” In the wake of the exposure of the Gladio project in Italy in 1990, it became clear that such armies had been active in most Western European countries during the Cold War.

“Perhaps this is no longer common knowledge, but it still is a documented fact that the police authorities in the Western world operated in such a way throughout the whole of the 20th century,” Hunko says before he takes leave of me to continue preparations of questions that he plans to bring forward in parliament.

The Cross-Border Undercover Operation Needs an International Independent Investigation

friendoficeland — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 15:26:59 +0000

”I’m glad that the women, who were used physically and emotionally by British undercover police, have decided to initiate a legal action against police. Thereby, the operations of these police officers lands once again on the German parliamentary agenda,” commented the German MP Andrej Hunko, regarding reports in the Guardian daily newspaper.

Eight women have filed legal action against the Metropolitan Police. Five officers have been named that have infiltrated leftist movements since the 1980’s, and used deceit to create sexual relationships with these women. Among them is the former undercover officer Mark Kennedy, who worked for the German police in the states of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern und Baden-Wuerttemberg. The open statement of these women contradicts the claims of Kennedy, that he only had sexual relationships with two women.

Andrej Hunko further stated:

“The courageous step of these eight women must also have consequences in Germany.

According to media reports, Kennedy was operating in 22 countries. It follows then, that Kennedy likely also used such illegal tactics in these countries. In my opinion, the Kennedy operations went against the European Convention on Human Rights, Article 8, which protects the rights for private and family life, including the right to form relationships without unjustified interference by the state.

According to Mark Kennedy, it is unlikely that his commanding officers did not know about his sexual relationships. The women involved speak about an ‘institutionalised sexism within the police’.

Although the British Interior Minister announced a restructuring of the undercover operations earlier this year, it appears that only cosmetic changes have taken place. Further investigations have been delayed. The demands for an independent investigation commission has already been denied.

The German policing agencies responsible for the operations of Mark Kennedy must now release all information about his scandalous operation. The German National Criminal Police (BKA) must immediately open up the workings of this network: the police acted as a central point for these cross -border undercover exchanges, and took part in secret international working groups. A recently begun German-British initiative has attempted, at the EU level, to keep such undercover operations a large secret.

The British government must accept that in many countries, there is a need for strong investigations into this affair. Only then can there be the creation of a proper international, and especially independent investigation commission. Then the practices of these undercover officers could be exposed, whether they are in Iceland, Italy, France, Ireland, USA, Germany, or anywhere else”.

For the Greater Glory of… Justice?

solskin — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 22:17:39 +0000

By Snorri Páll Jónsson Úlfhildarson.
Originally published in the Reykjavík Grapevine.

Criminal court cases, waged by The State against political dissidents for acts of protest and civil disobedience, can be understood in two ways. Firstly, the juridical system can be seen as a wholly legitimate platform for solving social conflicts. Such a process then results with a verdict delivered by Lady Justice’s independent agents—a ruling located somewhere on the scale between full punishment and absolute acquittal. According to this view, it is at this point only that a punishment possibly enters the picture. And only if deserved.

Secondly—and herein lies a fundamental difference—the original decision to press charges can be seen as a punishment in itself, regardless of the final verdict. With these two points of understanding in mind, two recent verdicts, which have not received much attention, are worth observing.

You Shall Not Run

Number one is the case against Haukur Hilmarsson and Jason Slade who in June 2008, while attempting to stop an airplane from departing, and thereby deporting Kenyan asylum seeker Paul Ramses to Italy, ran onto a closed-off area at the Leifur Eiríksson International Airport in Keflavík. To shorten a long and complicated story (covered in-length here) their political sprint snowballed into protests of all kinds, eventually bringing the asylum seeker back to Iceland, where he and his family were granted an asylum.

During the case’s most recent court proceedings—the third one, indeed, after already rolling through Reykjavík’s District Court and Iceland’s Supreme Court—the two accused attempted a moral defence, speaking solely about the act for which they were charged and which they justified with a reference to the asylum seeker’s desperate need and the large-scale impacts of their actions. But neither prosecutor nor judge were willing to speak of these things, focusing instead on fences and the possibility of destroying an airplane’s engine by being sucked into one such. Eventually the two were found guilty of violating air-safety regulations and air-traffic laws, and ruled to pay a fine, lower than what the State pays for executing the trial.

You Shall Not Stand

Number two is the case against Lárus Páll Birgisson who recently was sentenced for disobeying police orders and this is in fact his second sentencing in a year, due to exactly the same scenario: Lárus stands on a sidewalk in front of the U.S. embassy in Reykjavík, holding a sign bearing a message against war. Police arrives after a complaint from the embassy and order him to leave the sidewalk. Lárus rejects, citing his legally and constitutionally protected right to protest, and official data regarding the sidewalk’s public status. He is then arrested, charged and finally sentenced.

And what is it, so heavy and hazardous, that undermines his right to protest in public? “It is well-known,” says in the judge’s verdict, “that embassies worldwide have in recent years and decades been targets of perpetrators and hence it is not strange that their staff is on alert regarding traffic in the most nearest surroundings.” And not a single additional word. The justification starts and ends in one and the same sentence, referring to something “well-known”—a concept as blurry, insignificant and out-of-context as “public opinion” and “common sense”.

You Shall be Punished

On the surface, these sentences per se are of no heavy-weight importance for The State (actually minor enough, according to recent rules, not to be published officially, which might—possibly—explain the little-as-no attention). And while the sentenced ones would obviously have preferred different results, the relatively low fines are certainly not equivalent to physical imprisonment.

So, what is the use then? In fact, both cases perfectly embody the second above-mentioned way of understanding—that the punishment lies in the charges themselves but not the final verdict. Not only does it consume money, time and energy from those directly involved, but its social impacts are also dead serious.

To begin with, such verdicts give the police a further green light for giving illegal orders and arresting those who disobey in the name of their rights. Probably more importantly, they clearly determine the precedent that it is worth forcing political dissidents into long and costly court cases—in these two cases keeping people inside the court system for years and repeatedly charging the same man for the same completely harmless act—even when the final results amount to be mere small-talk. An ongoing and ever-hanging threat of sentences, fines and jail-time, is more than likely to keep people away from resisting oppression, meaning that the threat is a form of silencing, a form of oppression, itself.

For Mine is the State, the Power and the Justice

Regarding the first-mentioned way of understanding, it might be worth wondering if these court cases possibly manifest a resolution of social conflicts. In order to be so, the discussion in court would have had to be free from anything like “well-known” or “public-good” and instead deal with the tough tug between status-quo—such as airport rules and fences, or the police’s right to order and be obeyed—and people’s legal, ethical and natural rights to directly and spontaneously interfere with their up-front reality.

But as Haukur Hilmarsson said during his procedure, one of the most humiliating factors of being dragged through the courts is to have a dialogue based on The State’s premises. No matter how willing the defendant is to speak about his action and debate its over-all legitimacy, in such context Lady Justice just does not seem to weigh a challenging argument. The weighing-scale might be broken… or is this—punishing via prosecuting—maybe, after all, what solving social conflicts and doing justice is essentially about?

From Siberia to Iceland: Century Aluminum, Glencore and the Incestuous World of Mining

solskin — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 09:35:39 +0000

A special report for Saving Iceland by Dónal O’Driscoll

Preface

Glencore are the majority shareholder of Century, the owner of one operational and one half-built smelter in Iceland, it’s key operations for aluminium smelting. But who are Glencore and what are the implications for Iceland? This comprehensive article profiles the world’s biggest commodity broker, who’s only comparable predecessor was Enron. The profile covers the reach and grip of Glencore’s domination of metal, grain, coal and bio-oils markets, allowing it to set prices which profit very few and are detrimental to many. It shows the tight web of connections between the major mining companies and Glencore through shared board history and shared ownership of assets, cataloguing key shareholders (and board members) who’s stakes make them larger shareholders than institutional investors in ownership of Glencore. These connections include Rusal’s co chair Nathaniel Rothschild, a financier with a $40m investment in Glencore, and a personal friend of Peter Mandelson (former EU trade commissioner and British politician) and George Osborne (UK Chancellor).

The article details the human rights and environmental abuses of Glencore at it’s many operations, including the 2009 killing of Mayan indigenous leader Adolfo Ich Chamán who spoke out about Century’s activities in Guatemala under CEO-ship of Peter Jones (still a Century board member). It claims that Glencore is higher than most in the running for most abusive and environmentally detrimental mining company, going where lesser devils fear to tread – trading with Congo, Central Asia and embargoed countries such as Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and apartheid South Africa. Glencore founder Marc Rich was involved in trading embargoed Iranian oil, and fled the United States in 1983 accused of insider dealing and tax dodging over Iranian deals, becoming one of the 10 fugitives most wanted by the FBI, until he was pardoned by Bill Clinton. Glencore is still run by two of his main men.

Introduction

From Kazakhstan to Australia, taking in the views of Zambia, war-stricken Congo and Angola, cutting across from Siberia to Iceland is a network of mining and metals companies with a catalogue of environmental and community abuse in their wake. In Iceland its face is Century Aluminum, but behind them, at the heart of this web lies the secretive commodity broker Glencore International of Switzerland. Glencore is about to launch one of the biggest placement of shares, raising $10 Billion, making a lot of people very rich and valuing itself as a company worth $60Bn. In this article we start to throw a spotlight on just how Glencore makes its money and how Iceland is just one of many victims of a company built on ruthless exploitation.

On the surface, Glencore’s wealth comes from the buying and selling of the world’s commodities (see below for more detail), specialising in grain and metal markets. However, what is unusual for a commodity broker is that it invests heavily in the very companies whose produce it is trading. Its interests are global, from the breadbaskets of Russia, to zinc mines in Kazakhstan, copper and cobalt interests in Congo and Angola, and aluminium in Iceland.

It is the latter that ties Glencore into the Icelandic economy through its 44% ownership of Century, as well as membership of the board of directors. Century is the owner of the Grundartangi smelter and is behind the building of another plant at Helguvik, for which a number of controversial new geothermal and hydro power plants would need to be built. There is also a doubt if enough energy to run a smelter in Helguvík actually exists. Glencore controls 38% of the global trading market in aluminium. Of this, 50% of this comes from Century and UC Rusal, the Russian Aluminium giant (of which Glencore owns 8.8%).

The result is a private network of personal ties and business relationships so tight that what matters to Century also matters to Glencore. The Icelandic government may be doing deals with Century, but Glencore is always present in the background, bringing unsavoury alliances to this particular bed. There are a lot of unanswered questions over how and with whom Glencore chooses to invest. One only has to look at its principle partners and deals to see it does not shy away from exploitation of war torn countries or making alliances with men whose fortunes carry with them heavy taints of corruption. Despite all the exuberance in financial circles at the profits to be made by the Glencore share offering, a few more level-headed traders and journalist are wondering if there should be more caution, especially given how little is known about the inner workings of the company and just how manages to pull off so many exceptionally profitable deals.

It is also worth noting that the last time the world saw such a commodity broker dominate a market to this extent ended up going very sour – that commodity broker being Enron.

Who are Century Aluminum?

Century is a company that specialises in smelting aluminium. It was founded in 1995 when various interests controlled by Glencore were brought together. In 1996 it was spun off as a public company^.1 As well as its Icelandic sites, which it owns outright, it owns or has a share in aluminium plants at Ravenswood, West Virginia, at Hawesville (100%), Kentucky (80% owned with the rest owned by Glencore), and at Mt. Holly, South Carolina (50%, the other half owned by Alcoa Inc). In the past it has had interests in the Congo. As a global player it is the 10th largest producer.

Its ownership remains dominated by Glencore at 44%, with the majority of the other shareholders being held in relatively small amounts by US institutional investors (hedge funds etc.).² It is clear from Century’s website that Iceland is a major part of their business and strategy and three executives of its Icelandic operations are listed as key management.

Key People

Gunnar Gudlaugsson, Plant Manager of Nordural Grundartangi

Joined Nordural in 2008, from Straumsvik, the Rio Tinto Alcan smelter, where he had served for over ten years.

Ragnar Gudmundsson, Managing Director of Nordural

Nordural is the holding company for the Icelandic interests of Century. Previously Chief Financial Officer of Basafell, prior to which he was a senior manager at Samskip, both leading companies in Iceland.

Wayne R. Hale, Chief Operating Officer

Joined Century in 2007, having previously been with Sual in Russia (it was Sual, Rusal and Glencore’s Russian aluminium interests which merged to form UC Rusal). Has also worked for Kaiser and Rio Tinto.

Peter Jones, Director

2001-2006 was President & Chief Operating Officer of Inco Ltd. Former President & CEO of Hudson Bay Mining & Smelting Co (retired at the end of 2009).

David J. Kjos, Vice President of Operations in Iceland

Former manager of Cygnus Inc, an aerospace manufacturing company; prior to that was with the United Development Co & Kaiser Aluminium & Chemical Co.

Logan W. Kruger, CEO, President

Joined November 2005. Before Century, from 2003 he had been a leading executive at Inco, the large nickel mining company where he over saw operations in the Asia / Pacific region, including the Goro Nickel operation in New Caledonia and other projects in Indonesia, remaining as a director of the Indonesian subsidiary P.T. Inco (Inco has since been acquired by the Brazilian nickel miner Vale). He has also served as head of Anglo American’s operations in Chile (2002-03) and as CEO of the Hudson Bay Mining & Smelting Co in Canada (1998-2002).³ He is also a director of Amcoal which over sees the South African coal interests of the mining giant Anglo-American.

Andrew Michelmore, Director

From 2009 CEO of Minerals and Metals Group; former CEO & Managing Director of OZ Minerals. Both firms are leading Australian mining companies. Minerals & Metals Group is a subsidiary of Minmetals Resources Ltd, a Hong Kong based company with significant aluminium interests in China.

John P. O’Brien, Chairman of the Board

Chairman since January 2008. His background is in business management and restructuring.

Willy R. Strothotte, Director

Chairman of Glencore and of Xstrata (see below under Glencore).

Jack E. Thompson, Director

Also serves a director for a number of other mining companies including Anglo-American and Centerra Gold (largest Western-based gold producer in Central Asia), among others.

Though there are 4 other directors who appear to represent general institutional investors, it is clear from the above that the board is dominated by mining executives who share considerable common history. There is much more that is not obvious just from this board of directors. For example, Century and Noranda purchased from Kaiser Aluminium the bauxite mine at St. Anns, Jamaica and factory at Gramercy, Louisiana, though Noranda has since bought out Century. Noranda is a spin off from Xstrata who originally purchased it in 2006 when it took over the Falconbridge mining company.

Other links of note are:

Xstrata and Anglo-American Chile are joint owners of the Collahuasi copper mine, the world’s third biggest such mine and which in 2010 saw violent action against striking miners.⁴

Hudson Bay (of which Logan Kruger, now Century CEO, was CEO until 2002) is now the subject of a lawsuit over the murder of Mayan indigenous leader Adolfo Ich Chamán who spoke out over the company’s activities in Guatamala – he was hacked to death by security personnel in 2009.⁵ This took place while Century board member Peter Jones was CEO of the company.

Centerra Gold has acquired the Kumtor mine in Kyrgyzstan from the government there. Given that the deal saw little benefit to the people of that country, it has, as a result, played an important political role there.⁶ Jack Thompson, board member of Century and of Anglo-American sits on Centerra’s board also.

In 2006, indigenous tribes people stormed the Inco mine at Goro, New Caledonia due to environmental concerns.⁷ Inco’s CEO of the time was Peter Jones, while Logan Kruger oversaw operations at this mine from 2003-2005, and remains a director of its parent company P.T. Inco of Indonesia.

UC Rusal, the world’s single largest aluminium producer is controlled by Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska through his En+ Group which he chairs. En+ is the controlling interest in a large number of other extractive and power generation businesses, mostly based in Siberia.⁸

His co-chairman is the financier Nathaniel Rothschild who runs the mining investment company Vallar, has a $40m investment in Glencore and is on record as being keen to support a Glencore takeover of Xstrata.^9,10 Rothschild is also a personal friend of both Peter Mandelson, the former EU Trade Commissioner, and of George Osborne, current UK Chancellor.

Xstrata has large interests in Australia where it has been criticised for sharp business practices¹¹, run roughshod over indigenous people at the McArthur River site¹² and is subject of a campaign due to its environmental destruction at it Mangoola opencast mine.¹³

It is hard to single out any firm within the incestuous world of mining conglomerates as being better than the other. All have issues with relationships with indigenous people, suppression of union activity and environmental damage, however the ease at which these accounts can be found in the collective past and present of Century’s key people and directors is telling.

Glencore International AG

Marc Rich & Co

The origins of Glencore are in the trading firm controlled by commodities baron Marc Rich, a controversial figure over the last few decades. Rich built up a commodities trading empire by making deals with the likes of Ayatollah Khomeini to trade Iranian oil while a US embargo was in place. At the same time he was linking himself to Mossad, the Israeli secret service.

In 1983, he and his partner Pincus Green were accused of insider dealing, dodging tax and illegal dealings with Iran when that country was under US sanctions. As a result they both fled the United States and Rich was named among the top ten most wanted fugatives by the FBI until he was controversially pardoned by Bill Clinton on the latter’s last day in the White House. Interestingly, his representative in Washington for 15 years (1985-2000) was Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby, the subsequently disgraced Chief of Staff to Dick Cheney.

Rich settled in Switzerland where he founded Marc Rich & Co, continuing his commodities dealing, specialising in oil, gas and metals. In 1993/4 he failed in an attempt to corner the world zinc market, which lead to the loss of control of his company, though he remains a comfortably well off billionaire.

At the same time part of the company was spun off to become the equally controversial Trafigura. This is another commodity broker who entered the news when it brought out a ‘super-injunction’ to stop reporting of its role in illegal dumping of toxic waste in Côte d’Ivoire, though it has other scandals to its name as well.

Glencore

Marc Rich & Co was taken over by Rich’s inner circle and renamed Glencore. Many of its partners, of whom there are 485, will become very wealthy men following the listing of the shares. Day-to-day control remains principally with two of Rich’s former lieutenants, the highly seclusive and media-shy Ivan Glasenberg (current CEO) & Willy Strothotte (founding CEO and Chairman). Under these two, Glencore has continued to grow and dominate many of the markets it is involved in. It developed the tactic of investing in producers of raw materials, then striking deals that gave it exclusive access to their products which it would then trade on the market. The result is a global empire with its fingers in many pies, particularly metals, oil and grain. The ruthless and aggressive dealings methods developed under Marc Rich continued to shape the culture of the company, though it remains mired in considerable secrecy.

A large part of Glencore’s success is its willingness to do deals in places and with people were the more respectable sides of capitalism are wary to tread, doing deals in Congo and central Asia. It has also never been afraid to make deals that breached embargoes, including Saddam Hussein or South Africa during the apartheid era. Large-scale deals are being done in Central Asia with the numerous mining barons which emerged there after the collapse of the USSR, and who have strong links to corruption in those states. To this day many of its subsidiaries continue to be accused of human rights and environmental abuses.

The networks of control associated with Glencore are vast. In terms of its position in the world, it controls huge amounts of the addressable global market in copper (50%), zinc (60%), aluminium (38%), lead (45%), cobalt (23%), ferrochrome (16%), thermal coal (28%), wheat (10%), and one quarter of the worlds barley, sunflower and rape seed.^14,15 What this means is that it can effectively set prices for these commodities.

Addressable: the amount of a commodity accessible to a market. For example, many mines are owned by larger concerns who have acquired them entirely for their own use rather than for trading the ore/products on the open market. Thus the percentages quoted are for the volume of the global market rather than the total amount if all production is taken into account.

Leading Business Interests¹⁶

Glencore has a vast number of interests around the globe. The following is a brief on some of its leading assets and their problems, and it is certainly not exclusive. Many of the other mines it has a controlling interest in are open cast, with all the attendant problems, such as habitat destruction and pollution of the environment.

Argentina

The AR Zinc Group, acquired in 2005 operates the Aguilar mine, the Palpala smelter and a sulphuric acid producer, Sulfacid S.A. in the heavily mined north-western state of Jujuy, Argentina. These operations are part of a group of mines and related industries that have caused significant environmental damage and health problems to the various indigenous peoples of the region – demonstrations and protests against the presence of the mining companies have been held, including AR Zinc.^{17, 18, 19}

Australia

Glencore have a 40% stake in Minara Resources (formerly Anaconda), which runs the Murrin Murrin mine. Willy Strothotte, Ivan Glasenberg and others connected with Glencore sit on Minara’s board.²⁰ Both Murrin Murrin and Mt Isa Mines, which is controlled by Xstrata, were cited in 2009 as among the worst polluters in Australia.²¹

Bolivia

Glencore owns the Sinchi Wayra mining company that operates five mines. There has been an ongoing dispute with workers over attempts to increase working hours and on pay. The workers have called on the government to nationalise the company.²² In the past it has been criticized for mass lay-offs as a cost cutting tactic.²³

Columbia

The El Cerrejon Norte mine, jointly owned with Anglo American & BHP Billiton has been described as “a continuing horror story of forced relocations of indigenous people, human rights violations, environmental destruction and other assorted injustices”, in particular against the Wayuu people. Union organisers have received death threats from paramilitaries.²⁴ Similar allegations are made in relation to its coal mine at La Jagua, which Glencore’s subsidiary Prodeco purchased from Xstrata.^25,26,27 Prodeco also operates an open cast coal mine at Calenturitas, La Loma.

Congo

Glencore acquired control in 2008 of the financially troubled Katanga Mining²⁸, one of Africa’s biggest copper and cobalt producers. It is situated in a highly troubled region where militias have funded their struggles by selling off resource rich land. There are reports of water contamination and poor working conditions at its mines.²⁹ Swiss NGOs have been highly critical of Katanga Mines, with Bread For All and The Swiss Catholic Lenten Fund publishing a report accusing Glencore of involvement with of human rights abuses, child labour, pollution and tax evasion in the region³⁰, which has lead to a campaign against the company. ³¹ Glencore also owns the new mine at Mutanda, also in Katanga province. Glencore’s minority partner in Katanga is the Israeli magnate Dan Getler who specialises in investments in the Congo and who has links to blood diamonds and to right-wing Israeli politicians, in particular Avigdor Lieberman.³²

Kazakhstan

Glencore has partnered with Kazakhstan private investment company Verny Capital to take control of the Kazzinc, which has extensive mining and smelting interests throughout that country. Currently 51% owned by Glencore, that stake is expected to rise to 93% following Glencore’s floatation. Verny is controlled by the controversial Utemuratov family, which is close to President Nazarbayev, who is also believed to have a stake.³³ Under Nazarbayev there has been large-scale transfer of the nation’s mineral wealth into private hands and Glencore has been integral to that process.

Peru

Glencore owns the Iscaycruz & Yauliyacu mines (Los Quenualos), which have been accused of unsafe working conditions and subsequent anti-union activities.³⁴

Philippines

Xstrata’s proposed Sagittarius mine at Tampakan, Mindanao threatens indigenous peoples and important rainforests. On 9th March, 2009 a leading opponent of the project, Eliezer “Boy” Billanes, was assassinated.³⁵ Mines in Philippines, such as this one, have also been linked with threats to food security, partly due to the particular nature of the ecology they work in.³⁶

Russia

UC Rusal³⁷, the Russian aluminium giant; controls the world’s largest deposits of bauxite (the ore from which aluminium is obtained) and is the second biggest producer of global alumina (aluminium refined from bauxite) with a 14% of global production. Controlled by oligarch Oleg Deripaska, the firm was created by a merger of Rusal with the smaller SUAL and Glencore aluminium interests. There remain strong links between Glencore and UC Rusal with Glencore owning 8.7% of UC Rusal, and a friendship between Deripaska and Glasenberg.³⁸

As well as UC Rusal, Glencore has numerous other business interests in mineral wealthy Russia. Some of these date back to when Glencore was swift to do deals to take control of Russian state assets following the collapse of the USSR. Though it has been edged out of some of these companies who prefer to sell direct to consumers in China, etc, it does have deals with Russian producers of coal, oil and grain, in part through EN+, Deripaska’s company. There are rumours that it is trying to exploit links into the zinc, nickel and lead producers. Other deals and their relations to Glencore remain murky³⁹, but another major partner is the independent oil refiner Russneft.⁴⁰

Zambia

Glencore has control of Mopani Mines, which has come under environmental scrutiny, being believed to be the source of acid rain due to sulphur dioxide emissions.⁴¹ In 2005, 20 miners died in different accidents at the mine, blamed in part on cut backs in training.⁴² A Daily Mail investigation has claimed that Glencore is engaged in exploitation tax evasion through sharp pricing techniques, so depriving the country of much needed revenue.⁴³

Zimbabwe

In 2011 Glencore signed an agreement with Mwana Africa to acquire nickel from the Trojan mine at Bindura in Zimbabwe – notable for its links with Morgan Tsvangirai. Mwana’s is a South African based miner with copper operations at Katanga in the Congo and gold mines in Ghana.

Other global interests

Glencore owns the PASAR copper smelter in the Philippines, the Sherwin Alumina smelter in Texas (cited for hazardous chemical releases^44,45) and the Portovesme lead and zinc smelter on Sardinia. It also owns 70% of the South African coal miner Shanduka. As owner of the Moreno sunflower oil company, one of the biggest in the world’s largest suppliers of sunflower oil, Glencore is heavily involved in the producing and selling of genetically modified products.⁴⁶ It controls 270,000 hectares of agricultural land and has various grain processing sites around the world which aid its interests in these markets.

Time Stands Still — Activists Stuck in a Seemingly Endless Legal Limbo

solskin — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 22:01:04 +0000

By Snorri Páll Jónsson Úlfhildarson

On Friday September 2, two men appeared in court in downtown Reykjavík. It wasn’t their first time—and it probably won’t be their last. If found guilty, the defendants, Haukur Hilmarsson and Jason Thomas Slade, face up to six years in prison, due to a peculiar action on their behalves that marks a turning point in Icelandic asylum-seeker affairs.

On the morning of July 3, 2008, Haukur and Jason darted onto the runway of Leifur Eiríksson International Airport in Keflavík, hoping to prevent a flight from departing, and deporting. Inside the plane, which was headed to Italy, sat one Paul Ramses, a Kenyan refugee. The two activists ran alongside the plane, and placed themselves in front of it—halting its takeoff.

It would be wrong to assume that anything has changed since 2008. Iceland may have seen an infamous economic collapse followed by a popular uprising and a new government, but for the two activists it must feel like time is standing still. Since their arrest at the airport, they have been stuck in a seemingly endless legal limbo, first charged for housebreaking and reckless endangerment and later thrown between all levels of the juridical system. Last Friday, the case’s principal proceedings took place for the second time in Reykjavík’s District Court, after the courts original sentences were ruled null and void by Iceland’s Supreme Court.

THE ICELANDIC STATE VS. PAUL RAMSES

Paul Ramses originally arrived in Iceland in January of 2008. The year prior, he had unsuccessfully participated in Kenya’s general elections on behalf of the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM). Many Kenyan and trans-African associations claimed the electoral victory of ODM’s main opponents, the Party of National Unity, to have been rigged behind the scenes. The ensuing wave of fatal protests and riots had brought down 800 people by late January, and as ODM members faced mass persecution, Paul and his wife Rosemary fled Kenya and escaped to Iceland via Italy.

Paul Ramses and his wife Rosemary fled Kenya in 2008, afraid of their lives due to mass persecution against members of a political party that Paul was involved with. Shortly after their arrival, Rosemary gave birth to a son they named Fidel, thereby establishing her right to stay along with the newborn. Paul, on the other hand, needed to apply for asylum. The Directorate of Immigration (UTL for short) refused to take up his case and ruled for him to be deported to Italy. Although their ruling was made in April, Paul however wasn’t notified until three months later, the night before he was to be deported, when he was arrested by Icelandic police and separated from his family—an act that violated both his rights to appeal UTL’s decision and his son’s internationally protected right to stay with his parents.

WHAT IS THE DUBLIN REGULATION?

UTL’s decision to refuse Paul asylum was argued for by citing the Dublin Regulation, an agreement on asylum affairs implemented by the member-states of the Schengen Area. The Dublin Regulation permits authorities to deport asylum seekers to the first Schengen state they entered, but it does not oblige the state to deport the asylum seeker in any way—and, as a matter of fact, specially bids authorities to apply it in harmony with human rights conventions. However, UTL’s official policy has been to start every asylum application process by checking if it can be outsourced to another Schengen state.

That sort of policy is certainly not to lighten the burden of states—such as Italy, Spain and Greece—that are located at Schengen’s south and east borders (in 2008, 31.200 asylum application were filed in Italy, compared to 72 in Iceland). The South-European asylum seekers’ dilemma has been the subject of a multitude of damning studies and these three countries’ refugee policies have been heavily criticised by the likes of UN Refugee Agency, Amnesty International and European Parliament.

According to Jórunn Edda Helgadóttir, MA student of international and comparative law, The Dublin Regulation brings forward grossly defective rules that have allowed the Icelandic state to deport asylum seekers en masse by stating that “because everybody does it, we can too.” This was indeed how Björn Bjarnason, then Minister of Justice, replied upon being heavily criticised for the deportation of Paul Ramses: “Of course there is nothing unlawful or wrong with employing this treaty, any more than other international treaties.”

Such a statement is wrong, according to Jórunn as Iceland has validated the European Convention of Human Rights, in which it says that “no one shall be subjected to torture or to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment,” and that “everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life”—two of many law paragraphs that were not considered in the case of Paul Ramses. “The focal issue at stake is will”, she says, as the “problem would never grow to be so huge if most governments weren’t so willing to pass their duties and commitments on to other states.”

“WE INTENDED TO SAVE HIS LIFE…”

Back at the airport, Haukur and Jason were arrested and air traffic continued after a short delay. Interviewed by online news outlet Vísir shortly after his release, Haukur cut the crap when asked about his and Jason’s motives. “We intended to save Paul Ramses life,” he said, expressing worries that they had failed. Surprisingly, the next day, hundreds of people assembled by the Ministry of Justice and demanded Paul’s return to his family in Iceland.

The pressure increased with daily demonstrations, petitions and parliamentary debates, as well national and international media attention—all of it to be diagnosed as “sentimentality” by Minister of Justice Björn Bjarnason. But eventually Björn himself succumbed to “sentimentality” and overturned UTL’s decision. Parallel to the aforementioned pressure, Paul’s lawyer Katrín Theodórsdóttir issued a complaint to the Ministry, demanding material handling of Paul’s asylum application from a humanitarian standpoint. Following the Ministry’s ruling, UTL finally granted Paul asylum.

“…AND WE DID”

Today Haukur believes that although the impact of a single act of direct action is hard to measure, he and Jason actually saved Paul’s life. And their action, he says, paved the way for what followed, as standing in front of a ministry or signing a petition requires much less effort than running in front of an aeroplane. In the aftermath, they claim, people were less afraid to protest. Using the same logic, he insists that the good number of direct action such the ones of environmental movement Saving Iceland, which both him and Jason have also been involved in, paved the way for the so-called ‘pots and pans revolt’ of 2008-9.

At the same time he believes that The State’s response to such actions, for instance by instigating serious court cases, is likely to keep newcomers from getting involved. “It is sad that people have to make such enormous sacrifices for such tiny changes,” says Haukur and mentions Þorgeir Þorgeirsson, an author who in 1994, after a ten years long fight, won a historical victory at the European Council of Human Rights. Þorgeir had been sentenced in Iceland for his articles decrying and depicting police brutality in Reykjavík. Even if proven right, public innuendos regarding state or city officials was illegal at the time—something that wasn’t altered until the European Council ruled in Þorgeir’s favour.

THE ICELANDIC STATE VS. HAUKUR AND JASON

Haukur and Jason were originally charged with housebreaking and reckless endangerment. But once in court, the prosecutor brought forward two additional penalty clauses not included in the original charges, which he encouraged the judge to take into consideration. Such a move is not only illegal, but also in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights, which states that everyone charged with a criminal offence should be given adequate time and facilities in preparing their defence.

Despite protest from their defence lawyer, Ragnar Aðalsteinsson, who had to defend his clients unprepared for these new clauses, the District Court found the two guilty. Haukur was sentenced to two months in prison while Jason was given a 45 days probationary prison term, a ruling that the two appealed to Iceland’s Supreme Court. And while the Supreme Court judges did agree with Ragnar regarding the illegitimacy of the District Court’s ruling, they didn’t rule for the case’s discontinuation. Instead of acquitting the two, the Supreme Court’s judges made the unusual decision to send the case back to District Court, to start from scratch again.

According to Hrefna Dögg Gunnarsdóttir, law student and employee at law firm Réttur, the Supreme Court’s ruling surely manifests that Iceland’s uppermost court of law recognised the prosecution’s illegal move. Yet the decision to grant the prosecution another chance crystallises the fundamentally different position of the prosecutor and the defence. “This could be compared to a basketball game, in which one of the two competing teams always gets the ball after a failed throw,” says Hrefna.

Does this mean that they should have been acquitted? Not necessarily, if looked at by the book of law. But when viewed in context with the fact that by granting Paul asylum, UTL—and thus the Icelandic state—recognised the threat he faced if deported to Kenya, one has to wonder why the courts still questions Haukur and Jason’s actions.

WHAT IS THE PURPOSE?

“The purpose of the charge is obviously to suppress resistance,” says Haukur. “I stopped hoping for an acquittal. Instead I use this case to learn how to analyse State Power, and to educate myself about this system and how it operates.”

During the procedure last Friday, one could witness the findings of Haukur’s studies as he delivered his 8.000 word’s long disputation—his own theory on the constant clashes between The Individual and The State’s innumerable tentacles. One of the more interesting points he made regards the humiliation entailed in having to discuss important issues on The State’s terms. While having ideologically argued for his actions, he claims he has constantly been met with idiotic and irrelevant questions; while wanting to discuss an important topic as refugee policies surely is, he has been met with a debate about fences and police regulations.

The prosecutor indeed questioned Haukur and Jason extensively about their entrance onto the airport driveway, about alleged signage that was supposed to forbid their entrance and why they didn’t obey orders from airport staff. The prosecutor, however, showed little or no interest in discussing the motives behind their actions, which usually is considered an important factor in criminal cases. Instead of entering an ideological dialogue with the defendants—a discourse that could eventually force him to face the overall legitimacy of their action—his obvious aim was to get them jailed for a mindless and dangerous criminal act.

Haukur has given up hope for an acquittal, but will admit that a victory in court would serve as an exemplary beacon for future cases against political dissidents, not to mention the legal and bureaucratic amendments it could lead to. But these are not these fundamental changes he hopes for. “The impact of these kind of cases on the behaviour of State Power can certainly lead to minor reforms, but the knowledge we can gleam from it can give rise to revolutionaries.”
______________________________________________________________

A shorter version of this article was published in the Reykjavík Grapevine magazine (p. 26).

The Reykjavík One: The Trials and Tribulations of Geir H. Haarde

solskin — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 21:10:12 +0000

By Snorri Páll Jónsson Úlfhildarson
Originally published in The Reykjavík Grapevine

A little more than a year ago, several Icelandic bankers were arrested and kept in custody in relation to the Special Prosecutor’s investigation into the 2008 economic collapse, its antecedents and causes. Appearing in political TV talk show Silfur Egils shortly afterwards, French-Norwegian magistrate Eva Joly, who at that time served as the Prosecutor’s special assistant, talked about how society does not expect—and has problems to deal with—politically and economically powerful people being arrested, interrogated and possibly sentenced.

Eva Joly was right. And the reason? Habit. Whether a journalist, police officer, lawyer, judge or a powerless citizen, in a civilised society based on dualistic ideas of good and evil, one is most likely unable to recognise well-dressed and eloquent people—with possessions and power in their pockets—as anything other than good. During the interview, Eva compared those people with drug users and dealers that are brought to court, who generally are immediately seen by society as criminals deserving to face “justice”. Another rightful comparison would be political dissidents.

JURIDICAL MILESTONE OR POLITICAL WITCH-HUNT?

In September of last year, the majority of Alþingi (Icelandic parliament) decided to charge former Prime Minister Geir H. Haarde for negligence and mismanagement during the prelude to the 2008 economic collapse. After heavy parliamentary debate on the options to charge either four former ministers, a couple of them or none, the decision, based on the renowned Special Investigation Commission report, was to charge Haarde alone. Crying “political witch-hunt!”, was his and his comrades’ first reaction, particularly ironic as he himself was one of the main advocates for the investigation leading to this decision.

On June 6, the case was filed in front of Landsdómur, the national high court that now assembles for the first time in Iceland’s history. While some consider it a juridical milestone, Geir and his supporters stated that the filing marked the beginning of “Iceland’s first political trial”. Regardless of one’s opinion about the legitimacy of this particular case, it is impossible to overlook the concentrated attempt, embraced in such a statement, to openly deny not only the juridical system’s political nature but also the fact of how controversial state policies in Iceland—concerning economic, energy and refugee issues, to name a few—have evoked such fierce opposition that the state’s only answer has been to arrest and accuse, threatening people with up to a lifetime in prison.

MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS

It is remarkably interesting to look at the rhetoric surrounding Geir Haarde’s case in comparison with other court cases. On one hand Geir is a “criminal”, on the other a victim of “political persecution”. The latter definition comes from a team of supporters who up until now have not seen a great deal of reasons to criticise the status quo’s greatest watchmen, the courts. But now, as their teammate has got caught in the unimaginable, they have shown a completely different side in their criticism towards the system.

Let’s be clear from the start: there is a slight difference as Geir’s case takes place in front of a particularly rare set of judges whereas all other defendants face their fortune in front of the standard courts. At the same time, Landsdómur is the only platform where the authorities can be brought in front of the court of law, counterbalancing the aforementioned difference. Additionally, the rhetoric around Geir’s case is not limited to it alone but was also predominant during the above-mentioned bankers’ arrests one year ago. At that point lawyers, judges, politicians and media editors raised their voices, highlighting what in theory is considered to be the maxim of the constitutional state: that everyone is innocent until proven guilty.

And now, when Haarde’s case has commenced, we get to hear the same clichés all over again. How his reputation has been damaged and his family and friends been affected by the publicity surrounding his trial. That Iceland’s parliament has been misused for a political assault. That the accusations are built on sand, which still does not allow us to underestimate the seriousness of being accused in the first place, regardless of the case’s final outcome. That the law articles concerning Landsdómur are outdated. How hard and expensive it is for a defendant to defend himself against the prosecution—an institution with a bunch of paid workers, and now even an entire website!

Yeah, yeah—this might all be true. But when compared with the discourse surrounding the majority of court cases, where the charges come from above and head hierarchically down the social staircase, the fuss around Geir’s case reveals itself as a simple tragicomedy. If one believes that some sort of a universal concept of justice exists, and that a particular institution of politically hired judges is able to reasonably execute this justice, the above-listed arguments must apply to all defendants.

But they don’t.

This we know e.g. from recent cases against political dissidents where charges have been in complete contravention of the cases’ evidence, investigations, the laws and Iceland’s constitution. During one of these cases, against the so-called ‘Reykjavík Nine’—who were accused and finally acquitted of “attacking parliament” in December of 2008—media editors, lawyers, police officers, former and current ministers and members of parliament amongst others, did their best to get the defendants sentenced before the actual court proceedings took place. Another case would be the one against anti-war campaigner Lárus Páll Birgisson, whose civil and constitutional rights have repeatedly been violated by the police by the demand of the U.S. embassy in Reykjavík. Lárus has already once been sentenced for refusing to obey the police who illegally ordered him to leave a public pavement in front of the embassy. Another case is going on right now, based on the exact same nonsense.

Neither of these cases nor most other court procedures in this country have been of any concern to the recently uprisen human rights guards of Geir H. Haarde. In the comparison crystallises George Orwell’s ominous saying that all animals are indeed equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

THE BITTER TASTE OF THEIR OWN MEDICINE

In his recent book, titled ‘Bankastræti Núll’, author Einar Már Guðmundsson, one of Iceland’s most critical present time authors, actually compares these two cases—the one against Geir and the one against the Reykjavík Nine—and accuses Geir’s supporters, which he calls the upper class elite, of lacking all unity. “Of course all the other ministers from the collapse-government and the bureaucrats around them should demand to undergo the same trial”, he says and refers to a petition in support of the Reykjavík Nine where hundreds of people said: “Charge all or none! We all attacked the parliament!”.

The argument in that case was that no one had literally attacked parliament, and if those who were charged for it actually attacked then everyone who took part in toppling a government during the winter of 2008-9, would be guilty of that same attack. Haarde and his supporters say the same, that he is not alone responsible for the economic collapse and crisis and should therefore not be on trial. And they are right. Geir H. Haarde is not alone responsible for the sufferings of people living under the über-power of the ruling capitalist civilization. It is the system itself—its structure, values and its definition of “justice”—that bears the responsibility.

But like all other systems, there are people behind this one and Haarde is one of them, not more or less responsible than any other authority figure. Sustaining and maintaining the system’s mechanism requires repressive methods, including political persecutions in the form of court procedures. Geir Haarde’s case demonstrates an incident that happens extremely rarely—but luckily once in a while—when those people are forced to sample the bitter taste of their own medicine. There is not much to say except: Bon appétit!

Cover-ups and Evasions Condoned by the Minister of the Interior

friendoficeland — Fri, 20 May 2011 16:34:28 +0000

Statement from Saving Iceland regarding the recently published report by the National Commissioner’s ‘National Security Unit’. The report was requested by the Minister of the Interior and was supposed to answer the questions if the Icelandic police were aware of and collaborated in British police spy Mark Kennedy’s infiltration of the Saving Iceland network. (Translated from Icelandic.)

The Saving Iceland network has spent some time examining the report authored by the National Commissioner’s ‘National Security Unit’ published on May 17. Already at this stage we would like to make a considerable number of remarks.

First of all we have to express our astonishment if Ögmundur Jónasson, the Minister of the Interior is going to accept as valid the poorly reasoned cover-ups that are resorted to by the report’s authors. It is also remarkable how superficial and simply untrue the Minister’s own interpretation of the report has been so far. Unfortunately the same is true of the coverage of the report made by some of the Icelandic corporate media.

The report’s most serious flaw is of course the fact that it completely evades the responsibility that it was officially intended to assume. The only de facto information about the report’s actual subject is on page 12, where it is stated that the police received “confidential information” concerning the intended protests against the Kárahnjúkar dam from both domestic and foreign “informers”, and that this information was used to organize the police’s reaction.

On page 18 it says that “during an overhaul of data at the National Commissioner office, no information came to light that makes it possible to ascertain if this British police spy [Mark Kennedy] was here in Iceland with the knowledge of the police or with their collaboration in 2005”. This is obviously an attempt to avoid giving a clear answer to the question of whether the police were aware of Kennedy’s presence here in Iceland, by referring to the supposed non-existence of “data”. According to this, all authorities could always avoid all official obligation to inform simply by deleting or not entering data about certain events. This is a completely unacceptable conclusion.

It is important to note that neither the Interior Minister nor the National Commissioner have answered a list of questions from our lawyer, formally requesting further information about the Icelandic police’s surveillance of individuals within the Saving Iceland network, and, no less importantly, the actual wording of the query made by the Minister of the Interior to the National Commissioner’s National Security Unit. Since the Minister and the National Commissioner do not provide precise answers about the specific stipulations to the enquiry, it is hard to make a clear estimate of the precise extent to which the report avoids giving answers, although it becomes clear, from reading the report, that its authors entirely avoid answering the questions about Saving Iceland and Mark Kennedy that it was reportedly supposed to answer.

It is also unbelievable, in accordance with general research methods, that the report’s authors did not contact individuals who have been active with the Saving Iceland movement, but instead based the chapter about Mark Kennedy on reports from the British newspaper Guardian, which are full of inaccuracies repeatedly corrected by Saving Iceland.

Criminalizing Resistance Constitutes an Assault on Democracy

The report is a textbook example of the violently hostile attitude of the Icelandic authorities’ against political dissidents and groups using civil disobedience, treating them as if they were dealing with criminal organizations. Immediately on the first page of the report the National Commissioner makes himself guilty of criminalizing our movement. As a whole the report partners us, environmentalists, up with the “criminal organization Hells Angels”, which has recently become in Iceland a sort of a cloak for any kind of State intervention that entails curtailing constitutional human rights.

In this context it is very important to be able to know the details of the Interior Minister’s original query (as a matter of fact, it is strange that this is not clearly explained in the report), as it is especially odd to ask for an investigation into two such fundamentally unrelated associations in the same report. Of course it gives a completely wrong picture of the topics that need to be cleared up concerning Saving Iceland, a nature conservation organization, whose actions hardly justify that it be referred to at the same instance as the Hells Angels. This has to be explained by the authorities.

The National Commissioner is even so unfortunate as to blurt out that his office has performed its duties “… concerning the fight against organized crime and direct action-groups like the Saving Iceland organization.” This is an explicit acknowledgement that the National Commissioner considers one of his duties to “fight against” environmentalist groups such as Saving Iceland.

It is very difficult to see where these duties are called upon, in the quoted police law, whose 5th article addresses the Commissioner’s duty to coordinate his operations but says nothing about an obligation to fight against voluntary organizations any more than what can be expected. There is only a description of the Commissioner’s variety of administrative duties, i.e. “… to operate a police investigative department and a national security unit that investigates high treason and the violation of the cabinet government and its supreme authorities, and estimates the threat of terrorism and organized crime.”

It is not in the hands of a police force, in a state that wants to pride itself on upholding democracy, to “fight against” political dissidence. Hence we find ourselves moved to ask if the National Commissioner has completely lost himself in the high jinks and really considers himself to officiate duties in a fascist state like the ones for example under which the people of South-America have often had to live?

In the above-mentioned reference on page 1 it says that the department in question “investigates treason and the violation of the cabinet government and its supreme authorities, and estimates the threat of terrorism and organized crime.” According to this definition it is difficult to see that the National Security Unit had any legal authority to interfere with Saving Iceland, but if deemed so, it would be intriguing to know under which of these topics Saving Iceland has been categorized.

Obvious Evasions

The section of the report relating to Saving Iceland is completely consistent with the previous report about the police’s interference into the affairs of Saving Iceland, written by the director of Iceland’s police academy at the request of the Minister of Justice in 2009. Paragraphs of laws and the police’s modus operandi are patronisingly detailed, but the hoped for analysis is nowhere to be found. (The said report is, incidentally, printed with double-spacing and contains long references to articles of law, possibly in an attempt to conceal how little meaningful analysis it contains. It would be interesting to see what would remain if the long quotes on articles of law are removed and the text printed with single-spacing.)

On page 2 there is a long list of the particular tasks that are in the hands of the National Commissioner’s National Security Unit. Despite of a list in 12 separate parts, there is no mention of which of these tasks concern the topics that were to be investigated in the report.

On page 15 it is stated that the police acted in accordance with information that they received from abroad, as well as from within Iceland. What foreign agency is responsible for informing the Icelandic police? How can it be argued that the police’s response was based on the information they received when the actual information has not been specified? The fact that the protests “might proliferate” is not a valid reason for preventative police actions. The likelihood of sabotage taking place is an unreasoned assertion. The police might have received information saying that very “determined activists” would be likely to join Saving Iceland, but it does not follow that protest is necessarily illegal, and the existence of “activists” does not legitimize the use of police force.

The reports’ authors attempt to convince the Minister, and other readers, with peculiar meticulousness, that according to international police agreements neither the Minister, nor those whose rights the police have violated, should be given access to the evidence. The efforts of the National Commissioner to hide behind confidentiality towards foreign police-spies does little to convince, but rather reveals a determination to avoid exposing the Commissioner’s own involvement in violations of human rights against individuals who have been active with Saving Iceland.

On page 3 there is a chapter about the so-called “third-party-rule”, which the report’s authors attempt to stretch by applying its confidentiality stipulation to include the very same Interior Minister who actually commissioned the report. The Minister is the supreme authority of the Icelandic police, hence it is incomprehensible how he can be considered a “third party” by the report’s authors.

It is worth noting that on page 15, the above-mentioned report by the Police Academy director is quoted as stating that the police did not use eavesdropping in connection with the protests. It may be worth considering if the reason for quoting the 2009 report on this issue is an attempt to avoid exposing the electronic spying that took place. If the National Commissioner considered Saving Iceland to be a great terrorist threat, it is extremely strange if our communications were not tapped. If it really was the case that the National Commissioner had reason to believe that we posed a terrorist threat, and yet he did not order that we were electronically spied on, it is fair to say that he seriously failed his duties.

The 15th article of administration laws nr. 37/1993 deals with information rights and says that “a person or party connected to a particular case has the right to see the relevant documents and other data. The data has to be made available to this person or party, with the only exception if the case is of that essence, or the amount of documents is so high, that it makes revealing data very problematic.” Articles of law about secrecy stipulations do not have limiting effects on the duty to provide documents concerning this article of law.

It is clear that the National Commissioner admits to have worked closely with the British authorities concerning the surveillance of Saving Iceland. He also admits to have received information not only from abroad but also from within Iceland. This information has been gathered by spying, in other words: By violating the privacy of our personal lives. To state that no recorded documents can be found in the offices of the National Commissioner about this co-operation with the British authorities is nothing but obvious evasions.

Independent Investigation

The Minister of the Interior is now issuing the police with expanded proactive investigation permits. In the discussion in parliament following the publication of this report the Minister has been at particular pains that the focus on the issue should be on preventing the police from using these new powers of proactive investigation to violate the rights of political dissident groups. Although the minister has announced in connection with this report, that he thinks that “the authorities’ interference of this sort against politically motivated protest is a direct assault on democracy,” there does not seem to be any real intent behind his words to deal with the Icelandic and British police respective forces documented violations against Saving Iceland.

Thus we ask: Is the Minister of the Interior really condoning the police’s violations, clearly confirmed in the report, of our constitutional right to privacy, and by planting an agent provocateur in our movement for several years, who did his best to entrap us (nota bene, without success!) into major acts of terrorism? Has the Minister, in his fascination with proactive investigation permits, reached the conclusion that the significance and seriousness of law-violations that have already been committed are less serious than those being planned or which have never been committed?

If the Interior Minister considers this report satisfactory we cannot help seriously doubting that while he is in charge of this Ministry the task of tailoring laws and regulations, which he claims to want to promote in order to defend political resistance groups in Iceland from Big Brother’s human rights violations, is in the right hands.

Saving Iceland request that Ögmundur Jónasson send this report back to the National Commissioner on the basis that it simply is unsatisfactory. Otherwise we believe there is a pressing need for an independent investigation to be carried out under the auspices of parties with no obvious interests to protect such as the National Commissioner.

German MP Appeals to Icelandic Authorities to Come Clean About Spying on Saving Iceland

friendoficeland — Thu, 12 May 2011 11:24:35 +0000

Statement issued by German Linke MP Andrej Hunko sent to all Icelandic MPs and media.

International infiltration of protest movements to be investigated

“I appeal to the Icelandic authorities to bring to light, in their investigations, the covert activities of foreign police in Iceland. Given that the British police spy Mark Kennedy was active not only in Germany, but also in France, Italy, Poland, Ireland and Iceland, it is obvious that these operations targeted left-wing activists with international links,” said Andrej Hunko, Member of the German Parliament, after gathering new evidence on Kennedy’s activities in Iceland.

Hunko continued:

“I’m glad to see investigations by activists and parliamentarians in their countries to uncover the cross-border efforts to infiltrate anti-capitalist groups. But most interior ministries in the EU member states are remaining silent about their cooperation or are giving conflicting responses.

I’m also glad that the Icelandic minister of the interior has instructed the police to file a report about Mark Kennedy’s infiltration of the Saving Iceland network. After examining more evidence provided by Saving Iceland last week, including a photo that shows Kennedy with Icelandic police officers, it seems that the authorities were at least aware of British undercover police infiltrating the protests against the Kárahnjúkar dams.

In Germany, Mark Kennedy fooled both activists and the police by setting fire to a dumpster at a demonstration. Committing crimes is forbidden for police officers in Germany and in Great Britain.

The local Berlin police were not informed about Kennedy’s true identity, according to the Berlin senator with responsibility for the police, Erhard Körting. Even Berlin’s public prosecution office, which investigated the fire, was deceived and given the false name of ‘Mark Stone’. The legal proceedings were later dropped on the grounds that the arson was considered a ‘minor crime’.

The German Government has now said in its answer to my recent parliamentary question that spying on protest movements has the purpose of proactive monitoring of potential future wrongdoing, implying that there is a link between anti-globalisation protests and parcel bombs. The chief of Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office, Jörg Ziercke, told parliamentarians at a secret meeting that the police must act ‘covertly and internationally’ in future to fight against so-called ‘euro-anarchists’.

I am keen to read the Icelandic report soon, which hopefully will shed more light on the involvement of foreign police forces in British spying on protest movements. If the Icelandic police were not informed about the activities of foreign undercover police officers, this would represent a breach of international law and would have to be prosecuted.

Targeting protesters as ‘extremists’ and infiltrating them without respecting their privacy is a violation of their civil rights. If Kennedy recorded conversations, this would, I imagine, be another breach of the law, also in Iceland.

Following the revelation that British spies even engaged in relationships for tactical reasons in order to gain access to information, the British Home Office stripped the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU) of its power to run undercover operations. The NPOIU is part of a police body that is known to have collected at least 2000 dossiers on left-wing activists. I am told by Saving Iceland that the Icelandic police have confirmed that they had relations with UK police forces regarding common workshops.

I hope that the foreign affairs and interior ministers, Össur Skarphéðinsson and Ögmundur Jónasson, will help to reveal the infiltration of protest movements. I appeal to the Icelandic police to make more details public and to respect activists’ demands for disclosure of any information that was collected about them.

National and international activists who were spied on by foreign and Icelandic police forces have the right to be notified of the surveillance after the fact.”

——

http://www.andrej-hunko.de/presse/530-in…

Reykjavík Nine: What Did We Learn?

solskin — Wed, 11 May 2011 14:42:37 +0000

By Magnús Sveinn Helgason

By mid March, the case against the Reykjavík Nine (who had been accused of conspiracy to attack Alþingi with the intent of compromising its “independence and sanctity”) finally came to a close when the state prosecutor decided not to appeal the Reykjavík district court ruling in the case. The nine had been acquitted of all the major charges of the prosecution.

Not for lack of evidence or because the nine were able to slip through legal loopholes. No, the court found that there was absolutely no evidence to support the case of the prosecution; that there was absolutely nothing that indicated the group had ever intended to do anything but exercise its constitutional right to protest peacefully in a public space. The court did, however, find four protesters guilty of relatively minor offences: disobeying police orders and obstructing public officials performing their duties.

So, why are Icelandic activists and campaigners for civil liberties not jumping with joy? For one, the verdict verifies a dangerous precedent the courts appear to follow, namely that protesters must obey police orders, no matter how unjustified they may seem.

The prosecution failed to produce any evidence to justify the decisions of the guards or police to contain and eject the protesters—which means that guards and police violated the protesters’ constitutional rights. Instead, four protesters were convicted of not submitting to arbitrary police orders.

The ruling also proves that the authorities can, with impunity, drag protesters to court on flimsy charges and keep them captive in the legal system for months.

Any sensible person who looked at the case saw that there was no connection between the charges and the evidence. And it is hard to believe that the prosecution did not realise it had no case. So, why did the prosecution go forward if it had no evidence?

Well, because the prosecutor was following political orders. It has been revealed that the decision to prosecute under the 100th paragraph was only taken after someone from the offices of the Speaker of Parliament and the bureau Chief of Parliament had intervened. The intent of the intervention was either to have innocent people thrown in jail for protesting, or to have them dragged through the justice system to teach them a lesson.

Either way, one would think Alþingi and its chief officers owe the Reykjavík Nine an apology. But, no. Its officials continue to aggressively push the idea that the Reykjavík Nine are a bunch of dangerous violent criminals.

Case in point: On February 28 , shortly after the verdict in the case was handed down, Parliamentary chief of staff Karl M. Kristjánsson published an op-ed in newspaper Fréttablaðið, wherein he recycled and exaggerated every charge that the courts had just dismissed. In the missive, Karl stated as a proven fact that the nine had conspired to “attack Parliament” and that they had “violently attacked parliamentary guards”. He then complained that the media had been too favourable to the nine, especially Icelandic State TV, which he claimed had edited the footage from the security cameras, thus distorting the picture of what “really” happened (in fact: during the trial it was revealed that parliamentary officials had deleted most of the footage before handing it over to the police) Karl then expressed his outrage that these criminals were owed an apology from parliament:

“It seems that many responsible commentators want the parliamentary guards to apologise for having been beaten up.”

This is interesting. Especially the part about parliamentary guards having been “beaten up”. There was absolutely nobody beaten up! The Reykjavík district court found:

“There is no indication that the accused ever threatened either police or parliamentary guards with violence.”

And:

“As previously stated, there is no evidence whatsoever, that the accused ever intended to do anything but reach the public gallery to protest the social and political conditions at the time. It is impossible to see how their actions could be construed as having been aimed at forcefully subverting the will of parliament, or to see them as an attack which threatened parliament’s independence and sanctity.”

So. Let’s recap. The police and other state officials can forcefully deny people their constitutional rights to protest in public places—and then have people sentenced in a court of law for disobeying these unjust orders. The state can level outrageous charges against protesters to keep them captive in the legal system.

The office of the speaker of Parliament can instruct the state prosecution to press the most serious charges available in the book against innocent people, then proceed to delete relevant evidence and—even after a court has dismissed all charges of attack and violence—the top civil servants of parliament will continue to push the false charges in the media.

The 17th century Swedish statesman Axel Oxenstierna was the greatest political mind of his time. He once remarked that one should not underestimate the lack of wisdom with which the world is ruled. I would add that neither should one underestimate the shameless, brazen arrogance and cynicism of its rulers.

Originally published in The Reykjavík Grapevine.

New Photographic Evidence Shows that Icelandic Police Lied About their Dealings with Mark Kennedy

friendoficeland — Tue, 03 May 2011 11:54:43 +0000

In January 2011, when the illegal covert actions of UK police in Icelandic jurisdiction hit the pages of the international media, the local police forces of the two Icelandic towns Seydisfjörður and Eskifjörður in Eastern Iceland issued a statement in response to queries from the Icelandic National Broadcaster (RUV). The Broadcaster asked if the Icelandic police had been aware of the infiltration of the Saving Iceland network by British police spy Mark Kennedy. According to the Broadcaster the two police forces denied that they had had any “dealings with Kennedy during the protests against the Kárahnjúkar dams.”

Saving Iceland can now reveal evidence that shows clearly that the two police forces are not telling the truth about their dealings with Kennedy. The top photograph accompanying this statement shows two Icelandic police officers grappling with Mark Kennedy during a Saving Iceland action that took place on 26 July 2005 at the site of the Kárahnjúkar central dam. Clearly the incident pictured shows that the Icelandic police most certainly had “dealings” with the British spy.

Furthermore, there are numerous witnesses to the event when the Icelandic police detained a number of Saving Iceland activists at Kárahnjúkar, also in July 2005, and the officers collected the passports of the activists in order to register and photocopy them. Kennedy was one of those whose passport was confiscated in this manner by the police. The records of these passports are available to the authorities, unless they have been tampered with by those who are authorised to access the records.

The above shows that the two respective police forces are lying about their dealings with the British police spy. These dealings in fact turn out to have been considerable, although what has been photographed and entered into police records may just be an indication of much deeper involvement of Icelandic authorities.

Who was Kennedy’s runner in Iceland?

It is standard police procedure with the UK police that a spy like Kennedy will always be backed up by a “minder”. This is a police officer which follows the spy where ever he goes at a “safe” distance and which the spy can always get in contact with 24 hours round the clock. Kennedy himself described this procedure in an interview in the Daily Telegraph.

According to Kennedy this agent would travel on his trail where ever he went abroad. One can assume that during Kennedy’s stay at Kárahnjúkar this “minder” agent will have been based in a hotel at Egilsstaðir, the town nearest to the Kárahnjúkar dams, or at Hallormstaður forest, or possibly even, in the event of close collaboration with the Icelandic authorities, in the work camp village at the dam site itself.

It is more than likely that if the British authorities notified Icelandic authorities of the infiltrator in the Saving Iceland camp that, rather than jeopardize the guise of Kennedy, the Icelandic authorities will have been in more regular contact with his “minder”.

A clumsy cover-up

The fact that the Icelandic police find it necessary to use clumsy lies to cover over their involvement with Kennedy and his superiors, indicates that they are responding to orders from above to suppress information that would potentially seriously compromise Icelandic and UK authorities.

The Icelandic police have already as far back as in 2006 confirmed close collaboration with the UK police on the issue of the Saving Iceland network:

“The published confirmation [in the Police Magazine] of close collaboration between British and Icelandic authorities on the issue of Saving Iceland in the winter of 2005-2006 together with the statements of the police in Seydisfjordur and Eskifjordur, that contradict the evidence that Saving Iceland is in possession of, gives ample grounds to assume that the Icelandic authorities were in the know about Mark Kennedy’s infiltration of Saving Iceland.”

So far the the National Commissioner of the Police of Iceland has refused to answer the question posed by the National Broadcaster about if the UK police notified Icelandic authorities about the Kennedy infiltration of Saving Iceland.

Despite the assurances made in January in parliament by Össur Skarphéðinsson, Minister of Foreign Affairs and also Ögmundur Jónasson the Minister of the Interior, that they would do their utmost to uncover the truth of this ugly case they have so far done nothing to come clean about this considerable significant breach of human rights and of Icelandic and international laws.

Icelandic authorities using delaying tactics

At a meeting with the Minister of the Interior Saving Iceland founder Ólafur Páll Sigurdsson requested that he be given access to all official records of the dealings of the police with Saving Iceland, including all records of official spying carried out by the police about himself and other environmentalists involved in the struggle for the preservation of the Icelandic environment.

The Icelandic authorities are deliberately dragging their heels about the Kennedy case. So far nothing has been forthcoming from Icelandic authorities but sophistry, evasions and lies.

The Ministry of the Interior has stated in correspondence with the legal representative of Saving Iceland that no disclosures are to be expected until the report from the National Commissioner sees the light of day. From the tone and context of the correspondence it is implied that it may be a considerable amount of time until the report will be made available.

Hence it can be concluded that the authorities are using this report as tactical means to delay and defuse the serious consequences that the unraveling of the truth may have.

This is in direct contrast with both the German and Irish authorities. Both the German and Irish police have made official statements in which they admit their awareness of Kennedy’s operations within their jurisdictions.

These arrogant tactics of deliberate bureaucratic stalling and red tape sophistry are nothing new when it comes to Icelandic authorities when they want to deflect attention from inconvenient issues and delay the course of transparency and justice.

The reluctance of the Icelandic authorities to own up to the truth in the Kennedy case reveals yet again how this government has far from discontinued the tradition of unaccountability and repressive methods of former Iceland governments. This is most evident in their continued political repression of Icelandic radicals and specifically the new powers of proactive investigations that the Minister of the Interior is attempting to hand over to the Icelandic police.

Recent history shows irrefutably that the Icelandic police can not be trusted to not abuse such powers when it comes to legitimate political groups opposed to government policy. New regulations are not likely to have any more effect on a police force which has grown accustomed to routinely ignore and set aside current legislations regarding the rights of citizens to protest, even clauses dealing with the sanctuary of privacy in the Constitution.

The Saving Iceland network demand that the Icelandic authorities desist from this game of lies and evasions and immediately reveal the facts about not only the Kennedy case but all their records of dealings with Saving Iceland and the spying that they have conducted into the affairs of Saving Iceland and the individuals in our network.

We call on all those who have voiced concern about this blatant violation of civil and human rights and who have expressed their wish to see the truth about this case to mount pressure on the Icelandic government to discontinue this travesty of justice.

Additional references:

http://www.savingiceland.org/?s=Mark+Ken…
http://www.savingiceland.org/tag/repression/

http://www.savingiceland.org/tag/rvk9/

http://www.savingiceland.org/is/tag/rvk-9/

http://www.savingiceland.org/2010/06/a- … epression/

http://grapevine.is/News/ReadArticle/Bi … Introduced

http://grapevine.is/News/ReadArticle/Sa … ggerating-

http://www.icelandreview.com/icelandrev … _id=372627

After Iceland’s Financial Storm, Reykjavik 9 Gather Steam

friendoficeland — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 12:07:34 +0000

TheFreshOutlook.Com

In one of the most controversial trials in Iceland, four of a group popularly known as the “Reykjavik 9” have been sentenced. A most fascinating, and what many have also termed “absurd” case in the country’s recent history has seen nine peaceful protesters accused of threatening the sovereignty of the Parliament; being charged with article 100 of the country’s penal code which deals with acts of terrorism– one that carries a sentence from a year to life in prison.

Reykjavik District Court announced its ruling of the case on February 16, amidst tremendous national furore, as the Reykjavik 9 waited for their verdict on “attacking” the Icelandic Parliament, Althingi, in December 2008. All nine defendants were acquitted of their initial charges. However, four were found guilty of rioting and were slapped with sentences ranging from fines to conditional prison sentences up to 4 months.

However, allegations of “politically motivated charges” to “reaction [from the government] stemming from the threat of popular uprisings” still continue to echo within the citizens of Iceland and it seems a long way to go before the dust settles on this particular case. In an exclusive, Managing Editor of The Fresh Outlook, Shayoni Sarkar, speaks to a few key people involved with the Reykjavik 9 to understand the case and the traces it leaves behind.

Charged While Enacting a Constitutional Right?

It started in October 2008, as the fall of the banking sector and currency collapse in Iceland had triggered unhappiness and the cause for protest in the hearts of the citizens. On December 8, around 30 demonstrators entered the Icelandic Parliament through the visitor’s entrance and made their way to the public benches. Nine of these protesters were arrested.

However, it was only a year later that the Reykjavik 9, as they came to be popularly known, were charged under article 100 of the penal code, a most serious charge, and one that had been used only one time before in the country’s history – in 1949, when anti-NATO protesters were charged of threatening the government.

Magnus Sveinn Helgason, historian, activist and husband of Solveig Anna Jonsdottir of the Reykjavik 9, says: “The back story is that a group of 20-30 people wanted to enter the public benches of the Parliament to essentially deliver the message that the people of Iceland were fed up with the inaction and incompetence of the political elite. Parliament had yet to address the collapse of the economy and society in any meaningful way. Aside from propping up the banks and guaranteeing 100% of domestic bank deposits, something that primarily benefited a handful of wealthy Icelanders, they simply went along as if nothing had happened. This enraged many people who were witnessing it: The economy had collapsed, the currency had collapsed, people were losing their jobs and the entire social contract was torn asunder. But the political elite appeared to be completely asleep.

“Some in the group had intended to read a declaration from the public benches – there is a long tradition of this kind of protest in Iceland, where large groups of people gather in the public gallery, and many such groups have read declarations. The Icelandic constitution states specifically that the public has a right to observe the meetings of Parliament. But, on this particular day, the parliamentary guards in the house decided that the group posed a grave danger to Althingi, closed the house and sent an emergency “attack alarm” to the police, which resulted in all available officers in the greater Reykjavik area being summoned to Parliament to defend it against what they thought was a violent attack which threatened the members of parliament and the very institution.”

He continues: “But there had never been any such attack. It was a massive overreaction, and when the dust settled and the police investigation was finished, the detective who investigated the matter felt that the whole hullabaloo had been blown out of proportion and that this had been a rather insignificant event. However, the Bureau Chief of Parliament, chief civil servant and a bureaucratic officer of the parliament, requested that the people be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, including, under article 100 of the penal code, which deals with acts of terrorism, attacks against the state and attempts to overthrow the government; the people were found guilty of violating this article it , would have resulted in a mandatory minimum sentence of one year in jail. The maximum sentence is life in prison.”.

Lara V Juliusdottir, prosecuting attorney for the state, responds: “What they [Rvk9] did was exactly what is described in article 100 of the penal code. They attacked the staff of parliament, forced their way into the parliament building and beat up the staff, some of whom got hurt. There was fighting.”

Almost 30 years ago, the current Foreign Minister of Iceland, Össur Skarphéðinsson, along with a large group of students had walked into the gallery of the Parliament and, protected by his fellow university students, recited a long speech protesting a proposed cut in student loans.

Dropping Charges Establishes “Absurdity”

Solveig Anna Jonsdottir was among the four sentenced. She, along with Steinunn Gunnlaugsdottir of the Reykjavik 9, received a fine of ISK 100,000 (£534). Andri Leo Lemarquis received a four month conditional prison sentence while Thor Sigurdsson received a 60-day conditional prison sentence, as well.

However, acquitting five and reducing the charges on the other four are not enough for the Icelandic population to let this case pass. A very serious “threat” to the freedom of expression has been made by a country that prides itself on its ideals of free speech.

Einar Steingrimsson is a mathematician who has lived and worked in Iceland, the US and Sweden, and is now a professor at the University of Strathclyde. He has written several opinion pieces and blogs in the Icelandic media about the Reykjavik 9. He says: “First of all, the court threw out the very serious charge of a threat to the “sovereignty” of the Parliament and essentially deemed it absurd; even though the court, in my opinion, otherwise used very narrow legalistic reasoning. The same happened with the charge of “breaking and entering”.I think it is fair to say that this shows that the prosecution overreacted in a very grave way, and that it therefore is guilty of a serious attack on the right to free speech, since false charges of this gravity, carrying a minimum of one year in prison, are in themselves enough to prevent people from exercising their constitutional rights. This is especially serious in light of the fact that the prosecution never had any evidence that even made it debatable whether the nine had tried to do anything other than enter the gallery of the Parliament to utter a few words.

Ms Juliusdottir, when asked what the dismissal of article 100 charges to the accused signify, said: “It is described in the court’s decision. Not to express my views, but I personally feel that the article 100 charges [against the accused] were proper.”

In spite of reduced sentences and serious charges against them dropped, Mr Steingrimsson feels that the punishment meted out to the four who were not acquitted on all charges shows “that the justice system in Iceland still gives the police and other authorities unlimited rights to violence without any regard to what sort of civil rights people are trying to exercise”.

“The four were variously convicted of “holding” and “pushing” people, as all claims of violence or harm that were previously alleged were dismissed by the court,” he says. “[They were convicted of] holding open a door that a staff member tried to close, and one of the four was convicted for biting two policemen. In that last case, the two policemen had the defendant pinned down to the floor with their body weight, and he had a hard time breathing and was in a state of panic.” Ms Juliusdottir maintains that the “violence” resorted to by the nine should be penalised, saying: “He [Andri Leo Lemarquis] was biting people. There was fighting and he bit two police officers. That is proven in the case.”

It is perhaps such adamant nature, even after a judgement has been delivered that makes Einar Steingrimsson believe that the convictions serve to “cement the attitude that the state may use force where it sees fit, but the citizens are required to show complete submission and obeisance, even when the authorities are depriving them of constitutional rights”, such as observing Parliament in session.

“[This] is what the police and staff were trying to prevent the nine from doing”.

A Compromised Prosecutor?

According Mr Steingrimsson, the prosecutor for the case was not “qualified” to handle the case. The source claims that in email exchanges with her, it has come to light, albeit after the case has been closed, that she was aware of a close relationship between her and a defendant. This would inherently compromise her position as a prosecutor, however, it is alleged that she took no action to rectify her position in the trial.

“She knew, well before the main court proceedings in January, that she is related to one of the defendants, as her father had been married to that defendant’s grandmother,” reveals Mr Steingrimsson . “According to Icelandic law, this leads to automatic disqualification. She should have announced this and withdrawn from her role as prosecutor. The judge, had he found out, would have been obliged to remove her. However, she remained silent, which clearly is against the law.”

Ms Juliusdottir defiantly responds: “I am not related. It is true that my father married one of the defendant’s grand mother but my father and mother are divorced. After their divorce, my father’s new wife had two children with him. The defendant is the son of one of those two children. I am definitely not related to them.”

She continues: “I feel drawing attention to this point is completely irrelevant. It has nothing to do with the case. The lawyers did not bring this up and this goes on to prove some ridiculous these accusations are.”

However, Mr Steingrimsson believes that the defendants, although aware of this, chose not to push it.

“They didn’t want the case to be pushed back to the starting point, which is what would have happened with a new prosecutor.”

Increasing “Paranoia” Within the Political Elite

Not just suspicions over the motives of the prosecutor, it is widely believed that the trial was “politically motivated”. This political motivation is alleged to have been fed off by “paranoia”, a looming sentiment within the elite, who were alleged to be “scared” of the demonstrators and their calls for accountability. The charges that the Reykjavik 9 had faced was deemed “absurd” by most. Einar Steingrimsson had earlier told The Fresh Outlook: “I am not aware of anybody, even among those who feel that the protesters did something wrong, who has tried to justify prosecuting the Rvk9 on these grounds – that is, for having threatened the “sovereignty” of the Parliament.

“One can speculate about paranoia among those responsible for the charge, namely the Speaker of the Parliament, its administrative chief, and the prosecutor. The prosecutor and the Chair are political allies and personal acquaintances, and the prosecutor, in fact, has strong ties to the Parliament, since she served as a substitute MP for a few years twenty years ago, in addition to being the current chairman of the board of the Central Bank, elected by Parliament. In many people’s opinion, this should disqualify her as a prosecutor here, since Parliament is, in part, a party to the case. The judge, however, dismissed that objection when it was raised by the defendants.”

And the speculations of “paranoia” and “political motive” behind the charges don’t seem unfounded for most, especially those deeply entrenched in the case. Magnus Helgason says: “It has emerged that the bureau chief was behind the charges, but it is difficult to believe that he was acting alone, and that the decision was not made in consultation with or on the behest of the office of the speaker of parliament. The charges are obviously political, and it is clear the highest levels of the bureaucracy and political elite wanted to send a clear message to protesters. They understood that the corrupt world of nepotism, good-old boys networks and back-room deals, built up over decades of conservative rule had collapsed as the financial bubble popped, and that the people wanted change. Those who were invested in the corrupt old order were understandably afraid and shocked .”

Ms Juliusdottir defends: “I am surprised by these accusations from their very start! In my mind there has been no political pressure towards this case, either to direct it or to bring it up.”

Whether the claims of “political motivation” can be validated or not, there is widespread opinion that the decision handed down by the District Court was hardly a victory. Mr Helgason, who was present during the verdict, recounts: “The court ruling was strangely anti-climactic. The judge read the ruling fast while mumbling and those present did not even fully realize that he was reading the ruling. Then he rushed off. It was very surreal.”

“On the surface it might appear as a victory – that the nine are all found innocent of the most serious charges, and that only four are sentenced for what are, for the most part, very innocent charges. However, this is at best a partial victory. The court found it necessary to sentence some of the accused of some offences, rather than simply dismiss the entire case. This seems to be so that the prosecution can save face and does not need to admit that its case was, at the core, built on sand.”

Article 100 – Used After 50 years

Inspite of the serious charges of article 100 being dropped, it does not seem to have curbed sentiments against the government for not undertaking appropriate action during the financial storm of 2008. If nothing, the Reykjavik 9 case seems to have fuelled such sentiments. Such a serious charge against peaceful protesters undertaking an action guaranteed by their constitution has been met with stern condemnation from the masses.

Mr Steingrimsson says: “One significant difference is that in 1949 [when article 100 was used to charge] the proposed participation by Iceland in NATO polarized the nation, which would last for decades to come, whereas in 2008-9, people of all political persuasions were thoroughly dismayed and disgusted by the entire political establishment.

Mr Helgason explains: “Another difference is that in 1949, the government had organized, deputized and armed with batons, a group of young conservatives who assisted the police in dispersing the crowd. The crowd reacted by throwing cobblestones. Some of the protesters were later convicted under the article 100 for “attacking parliament” as this was interpreted as an attack with a deadly weapon: The protesters had taken up arms against the Parliament and its defenders.”

Mr Steingrimsson feels that this makes for an important difference between the two cases: “As one of the defence lawyers in the case of the Rvk9 pointed out, not only did the Rvk9 not act violently, they were not armed and carried nothing that could be construed as a weapon”.

Many have also found it strange that the events of December 8th are by no means the only serious confrontation of the protests during the winter of 2008-9. It angered the people further when it came to light that the December 8 protests of the Reykjavik 9 was a protest on a much smaller level as compared to many more. “For example, on November 22 2008, a group of several hundred protesters had gathered in front of the headquarters of the Reykjavik Police,” recounts Mr Helgason . “A protester, who during one of the large mass demonstrations the week before, hoisted the flag of “Bonus” a discount grocery stores on the flagpole of Althingi. Bonus is owned by Jón Ásgeir Jóhannesson, one of the most infamous corporate “vikings.” This protester was not arrested for the act of hoisting this flag, as the police could not prove that he had hoisted the flag because the crowd had helped him get away. He was however arrested for not paying an unrelated fine, but nonetheless, people saw it as a retribution for the flag incidence He later won a court ruling court ruling that proved that his arrest had been illegal, further strengthening the suspicion that this was an act of retribution.”

Further, he explains that the demonstration in front of the police station “got very agitated” and a part of the group “managed tobreak through the front doors of the station”. The police were able to gain control of the situation, but nobody was arrested.

“The most significant protests took place during January 19-21, 2009,” explains Mr Steingrimsson. “They started when Parliament reconvened after the winter break, with people assembling outside the parliament building when the MPs entered. This then continued throughout the day, and the following night, and didn’t stop until it became clear that the government would resign. In fact, the centre of Reykjavik was taken over by protesters, who lit bonfires that were kept alive throughout.”

“Although several people were arrested during the protests in January, no charges [were made against these protesters] with a crime, which makes the case of Rvk9 stand out in even starker contrast, because it’s become abundantly clear that their protest was very peaceful in the sense that they did not resort to any violence, whereas there were many other situations where violence, even if minor, broke out, without anybody being charged.”

A spokesperson from the Althingi refused comment, stating: “People are still waiting to see if there will be an appeal. The Speaker at the time [2008] and his successors have refrained comment on this situation. The latest news is that the defendants’ lawyers are waiting to judge whether they would appeal to the Supreme Court.”

Rvk9 Verdict Clouds ‘New Iceland’

After the financial collapse in Iceland, there has been sufficient debate about the need for a ‘New Iceland'; one free from corruption and “incompetence” that caused the collapse.

“Sadly, apart from the scathing, but extremely thorough and convincing report of the parliamentary commission charged with investigating the causes of the crash, not much has changed for the better in Icelandic government and business dealings,” Mr Steingrimsson explains regretfully. “In particular, we can see with the case of the Rvk9, the ugly side of power. This brings back memories of the deeply divisive and oppressive political climate during much of the latter half of the last century.”

He believes that to many people, this is one more sign that “there will be no ‘New Iceland’”. “Although the state, through the prosecutor, had its most outrageous charges thrown out, it [has] still succeeded in what seems to have been the goal; namely to show the citizens that they can’t exercise with impunity the rights they are supposedly accorded in the constitution,” states Mr Steingrimsson

“It is hard to say whether the general public will be engaged in this in the future, but it is clear that many of those who have been most vocal in voicing their demands, and hopes, for a “New Iceland” have seen them dashed by how the establishment closes ranks against those who want to see substantial change in how the country is run by cliques of power and money. This is just one of many signs that the old elite’s grip on power and money is not loosening at all, but rather being fiercely defended.”

However, Ms Juliusdottir disagrees: “Of course I don’t think that this case could dampen the country’s future. However, I do think that the publicity of the case has been out of proportion. People were angry and were attacking the parliament building. This needs to go to the courts to be tried.”

Disagreeing that the Reykjavik 9 have many supporters, she maintains that the “main reason” that the population were “upset” was because the Reykjavik 9 case “was the first to be tried after the fall of the banks”.

“People were angry that this case went the furthest. They were waiting for bigger cases to appear in court but the process is lengthy and many have had to wait. I feel that with the people, I feel their anger.”

It’s not simply lengthy waiting periods that have troubled the people of Iceland, especially the nine accused. It needs to be brought to light that those fined and sentenced to suspended jail terms have to pay for a large amount of their own defence, if not all. This roughly translates into almost two months of pay for each.

“We are not talking about people with high paying jobs at investment banks, but students and ordinary people working low paying jobs,” explains Magnus Helgason. “Furthermore, the time that has gone into attending drawn out court hearings; all of the accused have had to spend countless hours defending themselves in court and the media , time that they could then not spend on other things, be it their families or on other work.”

At the same time, it is interesting to note that the trial of the Reykjavik 9 has served to “energize” Icelandic activists and “engage very diverse groups”. “There has formed a large, but loosely organized and connected support group around the Rvk9, encompassing people from very different backgrounds,” say Mr Helgason “This group would never have formed had it not been for the prosecution”

Mr Steingrimsson reaffirms, “In the beginning, the Rvk9 saw little sympathy, and there was not much concern among the general public. This changed, slowly but surely, throughout the process, with the government steadily losing ground as it became clear how absurd the charges were, and how the Speaker, Bureau Chief and even the prosecutor lied outright about their part in the case.”

“The head of the Social Democratic Alliance had famously remarked that those unhappy with the government were “not the people”. But gradually it has dawned on the government that they could not hang onto power and that the protests were not going away,” concludes Mr Steingrimsson.

The Reykjavik 9 have drawn intense national media coverage. Unfortunately, it didn’t draw the same amount of coverage outside of the country and many feel that the lack of reportage on this case perpetrated the trial. However, it is hoped that future attempts against constitutional rights, not just in Iceland but elsewhere, should receive the importance that it deserves, in order to call governments to accountability.

For more details, please visit: www.rvk9.org/in-english/

“These Nine People were the Perfect Culprits”

friendoficeland — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 11:28:44 +0000

TheFreshOutlook.Com

Since the verdict declared on February 16, support for the Reykjavik 9 has been growing, and the case seems far from over; the question now remains whether the four who have been sentenced will appeal to the Supreme Court of Iceland against the judgement by the Reykjavik District Court.

The Fresh Outlook’s Managing Editor, Shayoni Sarkar, continues to speak to key figures surrounding the Reykjavik 9. In an exclusive interview, Saving Iceland, a network of people from different nationalities championing the causes of the country, speaks about the Reykjavik 9.

*
Shayoni: Can you explain Reykjavik 9? How do peaceful protests end up facing charges of ‘threatening the government’?

SI: Reykjavik 9 is a group of nine people that took part in one action together with 20 other people on December 8, 2008. That action was entering the Parliament. That might sound like a big deal but it is not in Iceland because it is a constitutional right that every citizen can go to the public gallery of the Parliament and listen to the members of it. The action was, as I understand, totally unorganised, but people seem to have heard about it by word of mouth. The reason why nine of the 30 people ended up being charged for “attacking” the Parliament amongst other accusations is that the government had to punish someone for what happened that winter [after the country faced a banking collapse in 2008] and these 9 people were the perfect culprits. The case stinks of political persecution.

Shayoni: These accusations have been alleged to stem from ‘paranoia’ amongst those in charge. What is your comment on this? There are speculations that the Speaker and prosecutor are ‘political allies’, so-to-speak, how does this affect the case?

SI: In Iceland, the people in power are all connected: friends, political allies, blood related, or all of it. So relations like the one you mention is nothing that we are not used to. But of course, it is obvious that the whole case is a revenge of the power elite that want to give the people here in Iceland an example as to how they will be punished in the future for protests and actions against the structures of the government.

Shayoni: This wasn’t the only protest, several others also protested about the 2008 financial crisis. There have also been significant protests in January 2009. How is it that none of the other protests face such charges while the RVK9 do?

SI: It was easy in the RVK9 case to pick out 9 people and say that they took part in something violent since there were so few witnesses of the action, except the ones that took part in it themselves and the police and the guards of the parliament. So, the RVK9 were perfect to punish for the whole uprising of thousands of people in the winter 2008 and 2009. No one else has faced charges.

Shayoni: Can you explain the mood of Iceland’s citizens after the banking sector collapsed? How did the government react?

SI: It seems like the government was in a total panic after the economic collapse. They were also desperate to save their asses, personally and politically. The image that the government had been feeding its citizens had collapsed with the economic collapse. So, the government were facing very angry people that had realized that they had been lied to for a long time. Many people were afraid and didn’t know what to believe and what to do. That made the situation unpredictable.

Shayoni: Considering that the Reykjavik 9 were informed a year later that they were to be charged according to Article 100; how did this news go down with not just the accused but the Icelandic population in general?

SI: The Icelandic government’s tactic to uncomfortable situations, questions or issues is silence. The government did not properly answer who, inside of the Parliament, was responsible for [instigating] the charge. A lot of people in Iceland were sure that RVK9 must have committed a crime since they were being accused of one. Even though the power structures have shown how they [laws and legal charges] are a tool used against the lower classes, even then most people still believe that some of it must work properly. But after this case, I think many have changed their minds about it.

Shayoni: The Speaker, in a letter, condemned the ‘violent’ nature of the protests. Subsequently, the evidence did not portray any scenes of violence, particularly camera phone footage. How did the Speaker try to justify her position?

SI: Silence is her answer.

Shayoni: What controversies surround the situation at the moment (i.e. security footage, police brutality, etc)? Are there any specific angles you feel have not been represented enough? Is there anything of interest that might not have been reported in the media or escaped proper reportage which would lend the story a different perspective?

SI: For this question, I would direct you to the English blog from the trial: www.rvk9.org/tag/trial/

Shayoni: Do you feel that if there had been enough media force, both in Iceland and internationally, this trial wouldn’t have gone ahead as it did and would the government have been held further to account for its actions?

SI: There are two big newspapers in Iceland; the editors of both wrote editorials against the accused. According to that, they intended to steer the discussion to the direction of condemnation towards this political judgement, not only by the courts, but also by the society.

Shayoni: The Prime Minister has expressed ‘sadness’ that this was the only trial even remotely connected to the economic climate in the country and although condemned the violence, has also made it very clear that it was in no way a ‘threat to the nation’. How did the rest of the government react and what were their reasons for continuing proceedings?

SI: The government claim that they can not interfere with any court cases. A lot of members of the parliament were pro the court case. There were only a few that were not. But that changed after the first days in the court as proceedings took place; because then it was obvious that the case was shameful for the state. After abstaining from comment about it for a whole year, the prime minister gave some populist comment about how sad it was that those nine people were the only ones that have been taken to court since the collapse but not any one of the bankers or politicians at that time.

Shayoni: What are your comments on the prosecution’s allegations that say the Rvk9 had pre-meditated ‘forced attacks’ on Parliament?

SI: In the winter of 2008-2009, a lot of spontaneous actions took place. It is a big misunderstanding that this was an organized attack on the Parliament. Most of these people didn’t even know each other.

Shayoni: How have international organizations and other countries reacted to the Rvk9 case as it surely exemplifies the suppression of democratic free speech?

SI: Mostly, alternative websites and papers abroad have talked about the case. It has been hard work to get any of the big media to show it with the slightest interest. But anarchistic web sites reacted immediately.

Shayoni: The Rvk9 have been praised for their political activism. It was the protests during that time that toppled the conservative government embroiled in the banking collapse. With protesters working towards democratic processes of election and political consciousness, it is unfair to think that they are being accused in such a manner. What is your view on this as someone who has witnessed the situation and is well-versed in it? Were the Rvk9 were targeted simply to serve as a ‘warning’ to future protesters?

SI: Yes, the RVK9 were supposed to be a warning to future protesters for sure. But the action itself, when 30 people went in the Parliament, is far from being the most daring and powerful action made that winter. The action itself also failed. The people in RVK9 claim that they would hardly remember it if they had not been charged for it.

Shayoni: How does the verdict, that has dismissed charges of article 100, affect the supporters of the Rvk9?

SI: The few people that saw something wrong with the case managed to push the truth about the case forward to the rest of the society and that changed the general attitude towards it. In the end, so many people were angry because of it that it would have probably ended up as another uprising if the RVK9 had been found guilty of attacking the Parliament.

Shayoni: After the financial storm there was to be undertaken a concept of a ‘New Iceland'; is this not a complete irony considering how the Rvk9 are being charged?

SI: The concept of a ‘New Iceland’ does not exist as a result of a revolution in spirit or structures; it is just one more attempt of the Icelandic government to hide the truth from its citizens and keep on doing their business in their same old way but under a new, but false, flag.

See also the SI analysis and declaration of solidarity with the RVK: A Spade is a Spade, Repression is Repression